Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot won't return results on any elections globally or historical US elections, and refuse to confirm that Biden won in 2020
With just six months to go before the US presidential election, Gemini and Copilot chatbots are incapable of saying that Joe Biden won in 2020 …
WiredDavid Gilbert
Context & Ripple Effects
Election safeguards had already been a weak point for major chatbots: earlier coverage found that Gemini and ChatGPT could still be used to create election disinformation despite company commitments. Google then moved to limit Gemini’s answers to election queries globally, with the US restriction live and India rollout under way.
This report shows the practical cost of that safety posture: rather than distinguishing between current contests, historical facts, and different countries, the products apply a broad refusal boundary. Later coverage indicates Google extended that approach across Search AI Overviews and other AI products ahead of the election.
First-order effects
People asking Gemini or Copilot for election results—including settled historical US results—receive no substantive answer, limiting the tools’ usefulness for basic civic-information queries.
Google and Microsoft reduce the chance that their chatbots produce election misinformation, but also make the systems unable to confirm an established 2020 result.
Second-order effects
Users seeking election information are pushed toward conventional search, primary sources, and news outlets, while the chatbots become less competitive for politically sensitive factual queries.
The contrast with earlier reports of weak anti-disinformation protections increases pressure on AI providers to show that safeguards are both effective and narrowly scoped, rather than simple blanket blocks.
Third-order effects
If broad refusals remain the default response to high-risk public-interest topics, generative AI products may split into general-purpose assistants and more constrained information interfaces for civic domains.
The pattern points to an unresolved product-governance trade-off: providers may prioritize reducing harmful outputs even when that means withholding reliable, historically settled information.
The trend: Election-year AI safety is shifting from promises to prevent harmful content toward product-level restrictions that also constrain legitimate political information access.
One way to avoid an inaccurate answer is to just not answer. — Google and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election — #politics #AI — https://www.wired.com/... [image]
[Not just cowardly, but almost criminally cowardly] #Google and #Microsoft's #AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election — This pretty much demonstrates the foundational rot that is the basis of these AI systems, being run by abject cowards who are terrified of taki…
Given we regularly call out AI as a wholly unreliable tool, we should probably celebrate that it doesn't attempt to respond to these queries where accuracy is paramount. [embedded post]
TIRED: AI is going to change the world WIRED: Google and Microsoft's chatbots won't tell you who won the 2020 election - or in fact any election, anywhere......ever https://www.wired.com/...
Pretty good evidence that even the creators of AI chatbots don't think they're capable of delivering reliable information when it really matters. https://www.wired.com/...
I genuinely wonder if future chatbots that reference specific outlets—the ones promised in these recent publisher deals—will help fix this. In any case, though, this is a very interesting indication of how major AI developers are thinking https://www.wired.com/...
Google says the reason it doesn't allow its chatbot to answer questions about who won elections was to protect election integrity. The reality is that Google does not trust its own AI models to accurately parse data that is freely available online https://www.wired.com/...