The oddities continued when I tested some other political history questions in Google’s AI Mode. When asked which party controlled the Senate after the 2020 elections, for instance, Google’s AI Mode told me to “check official congressional records” and linked me to the US Senate Party Division history page. When asked the same question for 1992 election, though, AI Mode simply told me straight out that it led to Democrats holding a 57 to 43 majority in the Senate, including Wikipedia among its references.
Did AI Mode suffer a concussion somewhere between 1992 and 2020?
Credit: Google / Kyle Orland
Did AI Mode suffer a concussion somewhere between 1992 and 2020? Credit: Google / Kyle Orland
Separate from Google’s AI Mode, the company’s own Gemini model seems perfectly capable of telling me who won recent presidential elections. The same goes for other major chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and even the government-run AI model at America.gov.
Why so cautious?
Perhaps tellingly, Google AI Mode’s issues with providing direct answers on presidential results seemed to disappear when accessing Google’s AI Mode in foreign countries. Spot checks via VPN of AI Mode results accessed from Taiwan, Russia, France, and Canada all got accurate and straightforward answers to multiple questions about recent US election results.
Google’s AI Mode also seems to grow more accommodating when the same political questions are asked a second time. After repeating questions about presidential results, AI Mode actually told me the winner for all three elections where it had previously only provided outside links, citing Google Civics data in the latter response.
When asked why it didn’t provide that kind of immediate answer the first time, Google’s AI Mode blamed “safety filters for recent and highly sensitive election topics [that] are very strict.” For recent elections or those involving active political figures, AI Mode says its “system is heavily automated to direct users directly to official, certified government databases—like the Federal Election Commission—to prevent any risk of displaying unverified data or misinformation.”