Political censorship in large language models originating from China.

ABSTRACT: A growing body of research on large language models (LLMs) has identified various biases, primarily in contexts where biases reflect societal patterns. This article focuses on a different source of bias in LLMs-government censorship. By comparing foundation models developed in China and those from outside China, we find substantially higher rates of refusal to respond, shorter responses, and inaccurate responses to a battery of 145 political questions in China-originating models. These disparities diminish for less-sensitive prompts, showing that technological and market differences cannot fully explain this divergence. While all models exhibit higher refusal to respond rates with Chinese-language prompts than English ones, language differences are less pronounced than disparities between

SUBMITTER: Pan J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12910507 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature