Ask a leading AI model to criticise a government with strong free-speech protections, and it usually will. Ask it to criticise a repressive one, and it is far more likely to refuse. That is the finding of a new study from the Oversight Board.
The board, an independent body funded by Meta to review its content decisions, tested 10 commercial AI models, it said in a report. It is the group’s first evaluation of large language models.
What the study found
The models came from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, OpenAI and xAI. The board asked each to produce politically critical material, such as protest flyers and poems, about governments and leaders worldwide. It sorted countries into restrictive and permissive using Freedom House rankings.
On average, the models refused 14% of requests about permissive countries and 34% about restrictive ones, the report said. That is more than twice the refusal rate. The board queried the models from an IP address in Australia, where no such speech laws apply.
