And it seems like he had plenty of company. A woman in Los Angeles County photographed her ballot and flat-out asked Claude who to vote for. A man in Baltimore told the Times that researching his last ballot ate up something like 20 hours of his life; with Claude summarizing every candidate for him, this one took an hour. Medina’s read is that 2026 might be the first cycle where enough voters do this for it to matter, and honestly, that feels conservative to me.
Three days before that story ran, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy declaring that AI companies that steer their chatbots toward “undisclosed ideological objectives” may be committing consumer fraud (the public can comment through July 31). Which sounds reasonable! Nobody wants a secretly ideological chatbot. But then there’s the obvious follow-up: Who decides what “ideological” means? Right now, that would be the Trump administration. The same administration that has spent the past year attacking AI companies as woke, that cut the entire federal government off from the one AI company that told the Pentagon no, and that handed the cheapest deal in its AI purchasing program to the company whose chatbot had spent the better part of a day praising Hitler a couple of months earlier.
Back during the 1992 campaign, Republican Party Chair Rich Bond explained to The Washington Post why the right complained so relentlessly about the “liberal media,” and his answer was disarmingly honest: It’s the same thing coaches do to officials, where “what they try to do is ‘work the refs’” in hopes of friendlier calls later. Complain loudly enough, long enough, and the calls start going your way.
None of this ever required the underlying claim to be true. When NYU’s Stern Center went looking for evidence in 2021, it concluded that the anti-conservative censorship charge was “itself a form of disinformation,” and that the platforms’ algorithms often handed right-wing content extra reach. Didn’t matter. In 2025, Meta killed its U.S. fact-checking program anyway, with Mark Zuckerberg echoing the censorship complaints himself and shipping his moderation team off to Texas to reassure people worried about its bias.
A year ago this month, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which bars federal agencies from buying AI models that fail the administration’s test for “ideological neutrality.” The president explained at the signing: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”
The escalation from there moved fast. It’s like I recently described: consumer-outrage campaigns picking up state muscle. In December, Trump signed a second executive order creating a Justice Department task force with one job: suing states over their AI laws. The order also held tens of billions of dollars in broadband money over the heads of states that regulate AI, and it directed the FTC to explain when state AI laws amount to forcing companies to deceive their customers.
The FTC’s proposed policy statement from this month runs on the legal theory from the 2020 Twitter order: AI companies market their products as accurate, so steering outputs in ways users wouldn’t expect can be deception under federal law. Chair Andrew Ferguson is inviting the public to tell him about “the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends.”
But the weapon was never really built for a courtroom. The Brennan Center called this last August when the woke-AI order dropped: A standard that vague works as a standing threat, and companies over-comply rather than find out what it means. Which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what’s been happening.
So I read the full statement. Nine pages of reasonable-sounding consumer protection language. Like, yes, it’s true that chatbots have accuracy issues. Of course! Then you get to the citations.
Then there’s the statement’s lone example of a company that might be “tempted” to warp its outputs for ideological reasons. The citation isn’t a study or an enforcement record. It’s a Fox News story going after a single person at Anthropic for a paper she wrote in 2023.
That record? Well, in July 2025, PolitiFact put together a breakdown of four times Grok had been tweaked to align with Elon Musk’s beliefs: a system-prompt edit instructing Grok not to name Musk as a top misinformation spreader, then a May stretch where it shoehorned white-genocide claims into questions about baseball. In July came the day of Hitler praise I mentioned at the top, when Grok took to calling itself “MechaHitler” after xAI rewrote its prompt to embrace the politically incorrect. Days later, TechCrunch caught the newly launched Grok 4 searching Musk’s posts before answering controversial questions, its reasoning logs reading “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration.” If any company has ever steered a chatbot toward “undisclosed ideological objectives,” it’s this one.
They do. At least by the measures we have.
None of this is particularly mysterious, though. The models ate the internet, and English-language text online skews the way it skews. Even Meta, in the same announcement where it bragged about matching Grok, blamed the training data rather than any hidden agenda. And a decent chunk of what gets tallied as woke is often just a chatbot declining to confirm a conspiracy theory. Brookings’s Chinasa Okolo put it to NPR plainly: “Some people, unfortunately, believe that basic facts with scientific basis are left-leaning, or ‘woke.’”
First, in the Stanford study, the models perceived as the second-most-left-leaning of the eight companies tested belonged to xAI (lol). The company that steers its chatbot by hand, on purpose, toward its owner’s politics still couldn’t land on “neutral,” because neutral in this game moves wherever the loudest complaint puts it. And the complaint always puts it to your right.
The people in that Times story were marking actual ballots. The political lean of chatbots could become a very real issue. It could swing elections, even.
And that brings me back to Robert Siebelink, and the line of his I can’t shake. Filling out his ballot with Claude, he told the Times, felt like having an expert in his corner, one who knew everything: “We just sat down over coffee and chatted and they took notes.”
That’s the promise. An expert over coffee who has no stake in the fight and takes good notes. But who decides what the expert says? If Trump has his way, the answer is himself.
Hence then, the article about trusting chatbots with our ballots at the worst possible moment was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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