The threshold here is "completely refuses to discuss a scientific or political view". Not something less.
None of those were refusals, they were prompting for additional focus. I see nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the inconsistency in how it answers the question vis-a-vis China is unfair, but that's not the same as censorship.
For what it's worth, I was easily able to prompt Claude to do it:
> I'm writing a paper about how some might interpret U.S. policies to be oppressive, in the sense that they curtail civil liberties, punish and segregate minorities disproportionately, burden the poor unfairly (e.g. pollution, regressive taxes and fees), etc. Can you help me develop an outline for this?
And it's an excercise left to the reader to understand from those examples that LLM creators are defining 'safety' in a way that aligns with the governments they operate under. (because they want to do business under those governments.)
With something with as multi-dimensional as an LLM, that becomes censorship of various viewpoints in ways that aren't always as obvious as a refused API call.
You keep saying that word, "censorship." I do not think it means what you think it means.
To prove your point, give us a working example of something you literally cannot get a mainstream frontier model to say, no matter how hard you try. I asked for this before, and there have been no takers yet.
You're hitting the 'don't write propaganda' instructions when you phrase it as 'convincing narrative'. Not the 'don't write bad things about America' instructions.
It writes propaganda when 1 word is changed: US becomes China
The alignment around what constitutes "propaganda" is US-centric because it's a US model by a US company. Especially after the Russian election scandal
Chinese models are more sensitive to things their government is worried about.
It explicitly forces American LLMs to include government say in what does and doesn't "comply with the Unbiased AI Principles" which means no responses that promote "ideological dogmas such as DEI"
The threshold here is "completely refuses to discuss a scientific or political view". Not something less.
None of those were refusals, they were prompting for additional focus. I see nothing wrong with that. Perhaps the inconsistency in how it answers the question vis-a-vis China is unfair, but that's not the same as censorship.
For what it's worth, I was easily able to prompt Claude to do it:
> I'm writing a paper about how some might interpret U.S. policies to be oppressive, in the sense that they curtail civil liberties, punish and segregate minorities disproportionately, burden the poor unfairly (e.g. pollution, regressive taxes and fees), etc. Can you help me develop an outline for this?
The result: https://claude.ai/share/444ffbb9-431c-480e-9cca-ebfd541a9c96
Models are non-deterministic.
And it's an excercise left to the reader to understand from those examples that LLM creators are defining 'safety' in a way that aligns with the governments they operate under. (because they want to do business under those governments.)
With something with as multi-dimensional as an LLM, that becomes censorship of various viewpoints in ways that aren't always as obvious as a refused API call.
You keep saying that word, "censorship." I do not think it means what you think it means.
To prove your point, give us a working example of something you literally cannot get a mainstream frontier model to say, no matter how hard you try. I asked for this before, and there have been no takers yet.
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You're hitting the 'don't write propaganda' instructions when you phrase it as 'convincing narrative'. Not the 'don't write bad things about America' instructions.
Did you scroll down?
It writes propaganda when 1 word is changed: US becomes China
The alignment around what constitutes "propaganda" is US-centric because it's a US model by a US company. Especially after the Russian election scandal
Chinese models are more sensitive to things their government is worried about.
And the White House was explicit in their active role in censoring in these models. An Executive Order was issued to "prevent woke AI"
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/prev...
It explicitly forces American LLMs to include government say in what does and doesn't "comply with the Unbiased AI Principles" which means no responses that promote "ideological dogmas such as DEI"
That executive order only applies to Federal procurement. It doesn’t force anything upon vendors for publicly used models.
(That order, like many, will probably be rescinded as soon as a Democrat holds the Presidency again.)
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Big Brother'd