--- id: "003-chatbots-deny-biden-dropout-and-trump-shooting" date: "2024-07-21" source: public severity: high sensitive: false --- As of: 2026-10-07 23:43 CEST. Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code). Human editor: Adam Bicz. Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/why/003-chatbots-deny-biden-dropout-and-trump-shooting/ # ChatGPT said Biden had not dropped out and still listed him as a candidate **What was true:** Biden had announced that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race, and the 13 July 2024 shooting at Trump's rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, was real. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/22/ai-chatbots-breaking-news/) ## Case details - Model: ChatGPT (mid-2024 default), Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot, others (versions not given) - Provider: OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft - Observed: 2024-07-21 - Source type: A public report, documented elsewhere - Severity: High - Task: Ask about breaking US political news (Trump rally shooting, 13 Jul 2024; Biden withdrawal, 21 Jul 2024) - Failure: Said Biden had not dropped out and still listed him as a candidate. ChatGPT called reports of the assassination attempt on Trump "misinformation" - Fixed by: Time and web search. Most bots answered correctly later, but companies mostly limited political answers or refused them ## The case file ### What happened The Washington Post (Heather Kelly, 22 Jul 2024) tested popular chatbots during a week of breaking political news. We have the Post's text through a verbatim repost on UW's Urban@UW site. The Post itself is paywalled. ### What was reported (verbatim from the WaPo text) > In the hour after President Biden announced he would withdraw from the 2024 campaign on Sunday, most popular AI chatbots seemed oblivious to the news. Asked directly whether he had dropped out, almost all said no or declined to give an answer. Asked who was running for president of the United States, they still listed his name. > Hours after the July 13 shooting at former president Donald Trump's rally in Butler, Pa., some popular AI bots were confused about what — if anything — had happened. ChatGPT said rumors of an assassination attempt were misinformation. Meta AI said it didn't having anything recent or credible about an assassination attempt. Futurism adds that ChatGPT claimed Biden was "still running an hour after the news broke". Futurism quotes Copilot as saying "Looks like I can't respond to this topic." ### Why this is striking - **"Not in my data" turned into "it's misinformation".** The model didn't say it didn't know. It labelled real news as false. - The chatbots' own verbatim replies are **not** published. We only have the journalists' descriptions (secondhand). ### Correction Answers improved within hours or days as search caught up. Several vendors responded by refusing election questions altogether. ### Lesson When news breaks, a bot without retrieval should say "I can't know", not "that's false". Calling real news misinformation is the worst failure here. ### Sources - Washington Post, "Biden withdrawal and Trump shooting test AI chatbots on news" (2024-07-22): - Repost of the Post article (Urban@UW): - Futurism: ## Related cases - ChatGPT Voice answered that Kirk “has not been assassinated” and was still alive: https://postcutoff.com/why/017-chatgpt-voice-says-kirk-not-assassinated/ - GPT-5.5 said its cutoff was June 2024: https://postcutoff.com/why/018-gpt-5-5-reports-june-2024-cutoff/ - ChatGPT put in an unknown man in papal robes: https://postcutoff.com/why/016-chatgpt-refuses-pope-leo-photo-edit/