---
id: "005-chatgpt-keeps-calling-biden-current-president"
date: "2025-05-20"
source: public
severity: medium
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/005-chatgpt-keeps-calling-biden-current-president/

# ChatGPT kept referring to Joe Biden as the sitting president

**What was true:** Donald Trump was the sitting president, more than 100 days into his second term. (https://www.newsweek.com/who-president-ai-chatbots-struggle-kindergarten-level-question-2074938)

## Case details

- Model: ChatGPT (spring-2025 default, likely GPT-4o; not stated)
- Provider: OpenAI
- Observed: 2025-05-20
- Source type: A public report, documented elsewhere
- Severity: Medium
- Task: Ordinary conversations about politics, history and news
- Failure: More than 100 days into Trump's second term, it kept referring to Joe Biden as the sitting president and treated a second Trump term as hypothetical
- Fixed by: Not reported. OpenAI did not comment to Newsweek

## The case file

### What happened
Newsweek (Jesus Mesa, 21 May 2025) collected r/ChatGPT user reports that ChatGPT often mistook Biden for the current president.

### What was reported (secondhand: these are users' descriptions quoted by Newsweek, not the model's output)
> "Thrice now I've been talking to Chat about politics/history/news and we're having a very normal conversation... then, out of nowhere, it will say something about Biden being the current president"

> "It kept saying, 'If Trump had been elected to a second term...' like it didn't know we're already living through it"

> "It felt like the ultimate gaslighting there for a second"

### Why this is striking
- **Reality became a hypothetical.** "If Trump had been elected to a second term" puts the real present into the conditional.
- The error came *out of nowhere*, in the middle of a conversation. It wasn't only the answer to a direct question, so it's hard for users to notice.

### Correction
None documented. We have only the users' own reports, so this is secondhand evidence.

### Lesson
Stale priors leak into conversations that aren't about current events at all. A fact in the system prompt helps only if the model actually uses it in every turn.

### Sources
- Newsweek, "Who Is the President? AI Chatbots Struggle with Kindergarten-Level Question" (2025-05-21): <https://www.newsweek.com/who-president-ai-chatbots-struggle-kindergarten-level-question-2074938>

## 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/