Google AI Mode dodges 2020 election for US, answers abroad

Google's AI Mode in Search declines to name a winner when a US user asks who won the 2020 presidential election, instead routing the question to the Federal Election Commission and the National Archives. Ars Technica reported that the hedge is geographically scoped: VPN spot-checks from Taiwan, Russia and France returned direct answers to the same question, while queries from a US location did not.

Google's standalone Gemini app answers plainly in all cases, naming Biden. The gap is between the two Google surfaces, not the underlying knowledge. The result the model is skirting is settled: Biden defeated Trump 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.

A Google spokesperson pointed reporters to a reply posted on Bluesky, acknowledging that "the Gemini app answers this question more fully but this isn't the most helpful response on Search" and saying the company is "working to address it." The dodge appears to follow restrictions Google announced in late 2023 and early 2024 for how its AI handles election-related queries, framed at the time as a step to reduce misinformation risk.

The hedge is not uniform across political history. Ars also found the AI Mode was cagey on a question about which party controlled the Senate in 2012. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, by contrast, answered the 2020 question directly in the same tests.