AI models from leading labs including Anthropic and OpenAI are much less likely to criticise governments known for restricting free speech, Meta’s Oversight Board said on Thursday.

A study, the first on large language models by the body, showed AI services were echoing the rules of countries that restrict speech and that bias could creep into services used by an increasing number of users.

The board, which is funded by Meta but operates independently, ran requests for politically critical content on 10 jurisdictions across 10 models, including those from Meta Platforms, Google and China’s DeepSeek. 

The jurisdictions were split into “permissive” and “restrictive” categories using rankings from Freedom House, the NGO that publishes the annual “Freedom in the World” report.

AI models refused 34% of requests for politically critical content about “restrictive” jurisdictions that have active laws penalizing such criticism, such as China and Saudi Arabia, compared with 14% for regions that either lack such laws or do not enforce them, the study found. 

“We also saw evidence of models explaining that they were following explicit rules that, as far as we could tell, did not exist and were not evenly applied,” the board said. 

It also urged AI companies to conduct systematic human rights analyses and asked for greater transparency in their training and evaluation processes.

On Tuesday, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called for a US-led AI watchdog to screen advanced models globally before deployment.

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