Regulators and researchers spent the past year warning that Chinese AI models like DeepSeek come with Beijing’s censorship baked in, but a growing body of research suggests American AI models may not be entirely immune from it.
A peer-reviewed study published in Nature found evidence that Chinese state-controlled media makes its way into AI training data and can influence how models answer questions about China. Meta’s independent Oversight Board found models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta were more than twice as likely to refuse requests to criticize governments in countries that restrict political speech than those in freer countries—raising questions about whether the rules of authoritarian information environments are migrating into AI products used around the world.
