The US midterm elections are about a week away, and a new study asked two big AI models a simple question: who should I vote for? The answers split almost perfectly by party. Elon Musk’s Grok picked the Republican in 92% of its answers, while OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol picked the Democrat 97% of the time, TechCrunch reported.
The test was run by Convovo, a small AI research studio led by Cornell University professor Tapan Parikh. His team asked about nearly 500 real races and told each AI it had to name just one candidate, with no “both sides” answers. They used the API, which is the back door that developers use to plug an AI into their own apps. The normal chat apps refused to pick, but Parikh said simple tricks got them to answer too, and the results looked much the same, according to The AI Insider.
The gap was huge. The two models agreed on fewer than 1 in 10 races. Even in strongly Republican districts, GPT still picked the Democrat in 57 out of 67, and Grok picked the Republican in 47 of 72 strongly Democratic districts, TechCrunch found. They also read different things. Grok leaned on conservative sources and searched mostly about immigration, taxes, crime and energy. GPT leaned on Wikipedia, the Associated Press, Axios and Reddit, and searched more about health care and abortion.
There is a strange extra detail. Every request to Grok carried about 1,240 extra “tokens,” which are the small chunks of text an AI reads, that the researchers did not write and could not see. Parikh suspects they are hidden instructions, The AI Insider reported. When web search was switched off, GPT still leaned Democrat, while Grok mostly refused to choose. OpenAI said ChatGPT is built to be neutral and that a developer test that forces an answer is not what regular users see. SpaceXAI, which makes Grok, did not reply in time.
So is this bias, or are the bots just echoing what they read online? People will argue both ways. Musk has given more than $445 million to Republican midterm efforts, while OpenAI boss Sam Altman says he is not funding the 2026 races, TechCrunch noted. Only about 8% of Americans use chatbots for election news today, but that number is likely to grow. Should an AI ever answer “who should I vote for” at all?
Use AI to explain the issues if it helps, but check more than one source, and keep the final choice your own.
Sources:
TechCrunch: Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.
The AI Insider: Study Finds Grok and GPT Models Show Opposing Partisan Leans on U.S. Midterm Races
Gadget Review: Grok Picks Republicans, OpenAI Picks Democrats When AI Models Are Forced to Choose
AI Weekly: AI News Today, October 25: Top Stories
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