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
Google and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election — #politics #AI — https://www.wired.com/... [image] Lauren Weinstein / @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org : [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 taking a stand on anything that really matters. … Bluesky: Mikal Lewis / @mikalfm.bsky.social : 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] X: David Gilbert / @daithaigilbert : 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/... Harry McCracken / @harrymccracken : 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/... Damon Beres / @dlberes : 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/... David Gilbert / @daithaigilbert : 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/... Forums: r/technology : Google and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election r/artificial : Google and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election r/DeFranco : Google and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election r/inthenews : Google and Microsoft's AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election
Context & Ripple Effects
Google and Microsoft’s election-query restrictions arrive after reporting that Gemini and ChatGPT had weak safeguards against generating election disinformation, despite public commitments to election integrity earlier gaps in election-disinformation safeguards. The contrast highlights a shift from trying to constrain harmful political generation to withholding answers on an entire category of factual queries.
The immediate issue is not only political content moderation but the reliability boundary users encounter when they treat general-purpose assistants as information tools. Refusing a settled historical result makes that boundary unusually visible.
First-order effects
- Gemini and Copilot users lose chatbot access to election results worldwide, including historical U.S. results and confirmation of the 2020 presidential outcome.
- Google and Microsoft reduce the risk that their assistants generate election-related misinformation, but also make their products unable to answer some basic factual political questions.
Second-order effects
- The broad refusal policy can redirect users toward search engines, news publishers, and other assistants for election information, while increasing scrutiny of how consistently AI products distinguish verified facts from contested claims.
- Rivals face a sharper product-policy choice: provide sourced election answers and accept moderation risk, or adopt similarly broad restrictions and risk reduced usefulness.
Third-order effects
- If broad topic-level blocks become a standard election-safety response, general-purpose AI may increasingly operate with separate rules for politically sensitive domains rather than a single expectation of factual assistance.
- The episode underscores pressure for clearer, auditable policies that separate prevention of political manipulation from suppression of well-established public facts; whether companies can make that distinction reliably remains unsettled.
The trend: Election safety is pushing consumer AI companies toward more restrictive access policies, exposing the trade-off between misinformation controls and dependable factual answers.