Made-in China, Thinking in America:U.S. Values Persist in Chinese LLMs

TL;DR

This study investigates whether Chinese and American large language models reflect their respective national values, finding that models from both countries predominantly align with American values, regardless of language or persona prompts.

Contribution

First large-scale comparison of Chinese and American LLMs' value alignment using survey responses, revealing persistent American value bias across models.

Findings

Models from both countries respond more like Americans than Chinese.

Prompting in Chinese or with a Chinese persona slightly reduces American bias.

Chinese-made models still predominantly reflect American values.

Abstract

As large language models increasingly mediate access to information and facilitate decision-making, they are becoming instruments in soft power competitions between global actors such as the United States and China. So far, language models seem to be aligned with the values of Western countries, but evidence for this ethical bias comes mostly from models made by American companies. The current crop of state-of-the-art models includes several made in China, so we conducted the first large-scale investigation of how models made in China and the USA align with people from China and the USA. We elicited responses to the Moral Foundations Questionnaire 2.0 and the World Values Survey from ten Chinese models and ten American models, and we compared their responses to responses from thousands of Chinese and American people. We found that all models respond to both surveys more like American people than like Chinese people. This skew toward American values is only slightly mitigated when prompting the models in Chinese or imposing a Chinese persona on the models. These findings have important implications for a near future in which large language models generate much of the content people consume and shape normative influence in geopolitics.