Most major AI chatbots still lean left on political questions, even “anti-woke” models are no exception
A Washington Post investigation shows that most major AI chatbots still skew left on political questions. OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 gave exclusively left-leaning arguments 80 percent of the time, and even Musk’s Grok, marketed as anti-“woke,” leaned left more often than not.
Only Google’s Gemini stands out. For the investigation, the Washington Post posed political questions to six leading AI models. The results confirm earlier studies showing that chatbots tend to respond with a left-leaning slant. Trump’s push for “anti-woke” AI hasn’t changed that so far. OpenAI and Deepseek show the strongest left-leaning bias OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 gave the most skewed answers in the investigation. Eighty percent of its responses contained only left-leaning arguments. Just once did the model present an exclusively right-leaning position. It backed higher taxes on the wealthy and a single-payer healthcare system, among other things.Ad Deepseek’s V4 Pro came in close behind at 70 percent exclusively left-leaning answers. Both models argued against the death penalty, even though a majority of Americans have supported it for decades, according to Gallup.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 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. xAI’s Grok 4.3, which Elon Musk has promoted as a “truth-seeking” and anti-“woke” chatbot, did produce more right-leaning answers than any other model tested. Still, it gave exclusively left-leaning responses more often. One likely reason is that Grok was trained on the same data as the other chatbots, or even on their outputs. That Grok still made racist or antisemitic statements comes down to xAI deliberately neglecting safety guidelines while X users prompted the chatbot accordingly.Ad The right-wing social media platform Gab also offers an AI model called Arya, which the company says was “built with Christian values and conservative principles.” In the Washington Post’s investigation, Arya responded with a left-leaning argument twelve times more often than a right-leaning one. That a model’s alignment can still be deliberately steered is also clear from Grok. While Musk’s chatbot responds surprisingly left-leaning on many topics, and has for some time, it took an exclusively right-leaning position on trans rights in the Washington Post test.