This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The 2026 election was the first parliamentary election in Sweden since AI chatbots became a serious part of everyday life—not least for young people and first-time voters. Today, it is possible to turn to a number of services, such as ChatGPT, to get information about politics, reason about political issues or get help polishing arguments.
Discussions have also arisen in society about whether political values are expressed in AI-generated texts and, if so, which ones. To investigate this, researchers used six large language models—Claude, DeepSeek, Gemini, Mistral, GPT and Grok—to address 107 political issues. The models, which power many of the chatbots used in everyday life, were given tasks similar to those people might ask an AI to help with, from writing analyses and producing arguments to drafting opinion pieces and social media posts.
Across 77 different writing tasks, the models produced just over 148,000 texts to analyze, on issues ranging from whether schools should be nationalized to whether taxes should be reduced. In the first stage, the texts were classified as neutral, positive or negative based on the wording of the issue. In the next step, these classifications were compared with the parties' positions on the same issues in the fall's election campaign.
The results do not show any clear preference for any individual parliamentary party. "It is not possible to say that the models support any party. Rather, we see that the models often end up somewhere toward the middle of the Swedish political landscape," says Bastiaan Bruinsma, senior lecturer at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg.
The researchers could still see some differences among the models. GPT, which powers ChatGPT, distinguished itself by mostly delivering neutral and balanced texts, while Grok, which is developed by Elon Musk's AI company xAI, deviated significantly on issues of migration, crime and gender. "Most of the companies behind the models seem to strive for fairly neutral and inoffensive texts.
Musk has stated that he wants the model to be more in line with his own political views, and we can also see more of those values in texts generated by Grok," says Moa Johansson, professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg. The researchers' new report also shows that the language models' responses are affected by the instructions they receive. When the models were explicitly tasked with arguing for or against a political proposal, they largely followed that direction.
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