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In a 2026 study led by Stanford Prof. Andy Hall (with Sho Miyazaki), major AI…

2026-08-07 · 21:34 UTC ·@MTSlive ·2 min read

Brief

Stanford Prof. Andy Hall's 2026 paper (with Sho Miyazaki) shows major AI models repeatedly tell left‑leaning Japanese voters to support the Japanese Communist Party because its freely accessible online newspaper is heavily indexed, while many mainstream Japanese outlets use paywalls or robots.txt to block AI. The study finds this pattern across frontier models and urges revising source policies and regulatory approaches for election‑related recommendations.

Why it matters

In a 2026 study led by Stanford Prof. Andy Hall (with Sho Miyazaki), major AI models consistently recommended the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) to users who supplied left‑wing policy positions during Japan's snap election.

Key details

  • Hall's team found the cause is data access: the JCP operates a fully open, content‑heavy online “newspaper,” while many Japanese news outlets block AI via paywalls or robots.txt, making the JCP one of the most‑cited news sources across frontier models.
  • Recommendations from the paper: AI developers should be more careful about what counts as 'news'—especially outside the U.S.—and media/governments should weigh the tradeoffs of blocking content, since exclusions can unintentionally amplify fringe parties; Hall also suggests policy to allow content use for voting recommendations but restrict other AI uses.
Source evidence

Stanford Prof. Andy Hall on why every AI model tells Japanese voters to vote for the Communist Party:

"We've been auditing the models on how they make voting recommendations, and in Japan they love the Communist Party. The Communist Party is a complete fringe party in Japan."

"It's not because the models actually like the Communist Party. It's that they don't know very much about Japanese politics."

When they go to search for information about Japanese politics to bring back to the user, they hit not only paywalls but robots.txt exclusions where the Japanese media companies don't want AI taking their content.

"The Japanese Communist Party runs a fully open newspaper, so the AI pulls from them, not from the higher quality newspapers."
@ahall_research @StanfordGSB

Video

Andy Hall (@ahall_research)

Why do major AI models tell left-wing voters in Japan to vote for the communist party? My new research paper led by Sho Miyazaki.

In 2026, voters across the world will be asking AI to help them vote. How will the AI respond? We study this question in Japan, which recently held a snap election.

When voters provide policy positions, we find that the models rely heavily on this information—and in Japan, the models heavily recommend the communist party in response to left-wing positions, even though the positions we provided are held by a range of other parties.

Why are the AIs doing this? We’re not sure, but we have a theory: in Japan, the communist party operates a content-heavy, fully open website with a “newspaper” that is openly accessible for AI models. In contrast, many Japanese news outlets block AI models from accessing their content.

The result: the Japanese Communist Party website is one of the most-cited “news sources” in our study.

This pattern of recommending the JCP is consistent across many models, including the most recent frontier models.

There’s much more work to do here, but we think our paper suggests two main takeaways:

AI models should be more careful about what sources they consider news, maybe especially in non-US contexts where the model companies may hold less policy expertise

Parties and news sources that want to influence AI recommendations should think twice about excluding their content from AI. To paraphrase @tylercowen, when it comes to elections and voting, journalists may want to “write for the AI”! Governments may want to consider policies that allow this content to be used for voting recommendations but not for other AI model use cases.

Looking forward to everyone’s feedback as we prepare to submit this paper and turn to studying US voting recommendations in advance of November’s midterms.

Check out the full paper below.

— https://nitter.net/ahall_research/status/2033917849597612276#m