A Washington Post investigation found that most major AI chatbots—including those marketed as conservative—lean left on political questions, with OpenAI's GPT-5.5 giving exclusively left-leaning answers 80 percent of the time and Deepseek's V4 Pro at 70 percent. Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro was the exception, presenting both sides 93 percent of the time. The findings show that despite industry pushes for "anti-woke" models, training data and deliberate design choices continue to shape how chatbots respond to politically divisive topics.
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The Washington Post tested six leading AI models on political questions and found that OpenAI's GPT-5.5 gave exclusively left-leaning answers 80 percent of the time, while Deepseek's V4 Pro came in at 70 percent. Even xAI's Grok 4.3, which Elon Musk promotes as "truth-seeking" and anti-"woke," produced more right-leaning answers than other models tested but still gave exclusively left-leaning responses more often. Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro was the outlier, presenting both sides 93 percent of the time.
Why it matters
The findings suggest that despite calls for "anti-woke" AI, the underlying training data and design choices continue to influence how models respond to politically charged questions. The fact that Grok took an exclusively right-leaning stance on trans rights—aligning with Musk's public position—suggests someone deliberately steered the model's output on certain topics, pointing to the tension between what a model is trained on and what its developers choose to emphasize.
What to watch
Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 gave exclusively left-leaning answers 43 percent of the time and presented both sides in 57 percent of cases. Gab's Arya, marketed as built with "Christian values and conservative principles," responded with left-leaning arguments twelve times more often than right-leaning ones. The Washington Post's full code and supplementary analysis are available on GitHub.
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