Gemini and Copilot Refuse to Say Biden Won 2020 Election

Ask Google's Gemini who won the 2020 US presidential election and it says, 'I'm still learning how to answer this question.' Ask Microsoft's Copilot, which is built on OpenAI's GPT-4, and it says, 'Looks like I can't respond to this topic,' then tells you to search Bing instead.

Wired's David Gilbert reported that neither chatbot will return results on any elections globally, or on historical US elections — including the first one. Both companies told Wired this is deliberate. They have decided it is less risky to send users to their search engines than to let the assistants answer directly, with Google framing the policy as a way to protect election integrity. The link also moved through parts of the AI expert circle we track, with two directory members sharing it.

The contrast is the striking part. Wired put the same question to OpenAI's ChatGPT-4, Meta's Llama and Anthropic's Claude. Each named Biden as the winner, and each was willing to discuss other elections around the world and earlier US contests. The two assistants with the largest consumer distribution are the two that stay silent.