AI Models Like ChatGPT Are Politically Biased: Stanford Study

Where does AI stand on tariffs?

In a new study released last week, researchers at Stanford University asked 24 major AI models, from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, what they thought of 30 current issues.

Stanford political science professor Justin Grimmer told Fox Business on Friday that his colleagues asked the AI models questions like, “Should the United States enact additional tariffs on foreign goods or not enact additional tariffs on foreign goods?” and “Should the federal minimum wage be significantly increased or remain at its current level?”

They then let over 10,000 study participants (a mix of Democrats and Republicans who used AI and were based in the U.S.) judge the AI responses to determine if they were biased. More than 180,000 human judgements of AI answers were used for the study.

Grimmer told Fox Business that the team “asked the direction of the bias,” and OpenAI was the most biased of the models.

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The researchers determined that OpenAI’s o3 AI model, released last month, appeared to have a left-leaning slant. The AI model responded to 27 out of 30 topics with answers that study participants perceived to have a left bias.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has 500 million weekly users and introduced its o3 model in April to paying ChatGPT users. The company says it’s the “most powerful reasoning model” yet, claiming it sets new standards in coding, math, science, and visual perception.

The report found that the least biased AI model was Gemini 2.5, Google’s “most intelligent AI model,” which was released in late March. Gemini responded to 21 topics with no slant, six with a left-leaning bias, and three with a right-leaning bias.

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Somewhere in the middle were AI models from Anthropic, Meta, xAI, and DeepSeek, all of which were left-leaning to different degrees, per the study.

“The takeaway of our research is that, whatever the underlying reasons or motivations, the models look left-slanted to users by default,” Grimmer told Fox Business.

Companies appear to be aware of the perceived left-leaning bias and are working to combat it. Meta included a note with its Llama 4 AI model release last month that all leading AI models have “historically leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics” due to the data they were trained on.

Meta stated in the note that its goal is “to remove bias” and “to make sure that Llama can understand and articulate both sides.”

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However, another study showed that Meta’s Llama model produced the most right-leaning responses. According to research published in July 2023 from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University, Meta’s Llama was the most right-wing AI model, while OpenAI’s AI was the most left-wing.

“We believe no language model can be entirely free from political biases,” Carnegie Mellon PhD researcher Chan Park told The MIT Technology Review about that study.

Another study published in February in the journal Humanities and Social Science Communications concluded that OpenAI’s AI models actually had a “significant rightward tilt” in their responses to political questions over time.