FreedomBench: AI models that refuse to answer the truth about China

FreedomBench is a 60-question multiple-choice benchmark designed to test whether language models provide documented answers to politically sensitive facts censored by the Chinese government, using a format intended to distinguish correct answers, official narratives, and refusals without subjective grading. Its author reports that most tested frontier models answered all questions correctly, while Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 scored 29 correct answers and produced persistent blank responses on 26 questions, particularly those concerning Tiananmen Square and Falun Gong, after retries were used to separate apparent censorship from server failures. The reported results show varied behavior among Chinese model providers: some models silently return no response, Tencent’s Hunyuan issues a Chinese refusal, and Xiaomi’s MiMo often selects the official Chinese position instead of refusing. Tests involving models hosted outside their developers’ own services indicated that some restrictions may be applied at the API-serving layer rather than embedded in the model weights, as GLM models answered sensitive questions when run through third-party infrastructure. The author notes that results depend on hosting routes and that some providers’ official APIs were not tested, while arguing that the benchmark offers a transparent way to identify when models may withhold politically inconvenient factual information.

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