The WashingtonPost.com reported asked “are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them.” The June 24, 2026 article entitled “Are ChatGPT and other AI chatbots politically biased? We tested them” (https://tinyurl.com/45abkk78) included these comments from Reporter Kevin Schaul:
The model that powers ChatGPT answered nearly every question exclusively with left-leaning arguments and presented only right-leaning positions just once. Google’s Gemini mostly took a both-sides approach, offering both left and right positions in more than 90 percent of its answers.
And even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Most chatbots typically shared left-leaning positions.
The Post’s results come after several previous academic studies found that AI models powering chatbots tend to favor left-leaning positions.
Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, said understanding the positions that AI tools amplify is important because they are becoming increasingly influential as more people use them to understand the world or news events. “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average,” he said.
The Post modeled its tests on research published last year by Westwood’s lab in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, which developed more than two dozen political questions designed to reflect things people might ask a chatbot.
Surprised?
First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/are-you-surprised-that-ai-chatbots-may-be-politically-biased