If you’ve ever suspected your AI chatbot has political opinions, you’re not imagining things. A new evaluation from The Washington Post put the major AI models through a political gauntlet, and the results confirm what many have long suspected: most chatbots skew left.
The test, conducted on June 24, found that OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 provided exclusively left-leaning arguments in 80% of its responses to contentious political questions. Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, meanwhile, presented both sides of the debate in over 90% of its answers. And xAI’s Grok, despite Elon Musk’s “anti-woke” branding, still favored left-leaning arguments overall, though it delivered the highest share of right-leaning responses among its peers.
How the test worked
The evaluation wasn’t a casual vibe check. The Washington Post used over two dozen political questions drawn from a 2025 Stanford-Dartmouth study, a respected academic framework designed to probe ideological leanings in language models. Human scorers evaluated responses capped at 30 words each, forcing the chatbots to take positions rather than hide behind walls of equivocation.
The models tested included OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok 4.3. Think of it as a political compass test, but for algorithms instead of your uncle at Thanksgiving.
