The hidden way dictatorships are shaping what AI tells you

In the near future, a handful of AI platforms could shape the way that billions of people see the world. Already, there is evidence that large language models (LLMs)—today’s preeminent form of AI—are persuading some users to change their views. This has generated fears about chatbots’ potential to spread state propaganda. Such anxieties generally center on the prospect of major AI labs consciously designing their LLMs to favor pro-regime perspectives while suppressing dissident ones. And there is some basis for this worry: The Chinese AI company DeepSeek programmed its model to evade discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre and other topics inconvenient to the Chinese Communist Party. This said, no authoritarian state is currently in a position to directly intervene in the programming decisions of the frontier AI systems—ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, all of which are run by firms in the United States. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that autocracies aren’t influencing the behavior of those LLMs—or won’t benefit from the way they color public opinion. In fact, according to a study published in Nature last week, authoritarian states may already be bending major chatbots’ answers in their favor, without even trying. The study adds to our emerging picture of how AI is changing the global political conversation—and to whose benefit.