Is AI Geopolitical? Mapping Political Bias of LLMs around International Events

Increasing reliance on ‘trusting’ LLMs for various tasks makes their political biases even more relevant. Such biases can be a subtle yet nefarious way for viewpoints to be influenced or manipulated. One question is whether such biases are related to government policies or public opinion in the country where they were developed. This paper investigates this by collecting the detailed stances of 83 LLMs across 23 countries on four international issues: 1) Ukraine conflict 2) Israel/Palestine conflict 3) migration and 4) trade. Such LLM stances are then mapped against government policy and popular opinion in the LLM countries of origin. The results show evidence of some alignment between geopolitics and LLM stances but only in some circumstances and often with internal inconsistencies. The paper provides strong evidence that LLMs should be monitored for their political biases on international issues to allow critical evaluation of their potential contribution to misinformation and unbalanced discourse.