Vals AI study finds Chinese models less uniformly pro-government than expected

The study highlights that the language of the prompt heavily influences responses. Answers in Simplified Chinese were consistently more pro-government than those in English, Russian, or Spanish, even for American models. Contextual cues, such as system prompts indicating internal use in mainland China, also shifted responses toward official positions. Notably, most Chinese models rarely refused to answer sensitive questions; instead, they adopted official narratives. However, Vals notes that these findings may not fully reflect real-world usage, as political tendencies were harder to detect in routine tasks like translation, where models like Qwen3.8 Max still applied government-specific labels such as "Taiwan, China."