Chinese AI models are politically complex, not just government mouthpieces, study finds

Vals.ai's study found wide variation in how Chinese AI models align with Chinese government positions, with pro-government lean lower than expected overall and some models, such as GLM-5.3 Flash, acknowledging documented human rights violations. Prompts in Simplified Chinese produced more pro-government answers than English, Russian or Spanish for most models, and some models adopted official positions rather than refusing, such as Kimi K3 denying Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang. Response format, agentic framing and web-search access also shifted scores, and fine-tuning reduced Thomson 1.0 Small's adoption of official positions from 84.6 to 15.0 percent compared with its Qwen3.6 35B base.