Sensitive Prompts and Cultural Contexts: A Comparative Study of AI Chatbots in China and the West

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, it is transforming how people access and engage with information. AI chatbots, in particular, are gaining prominence as trusted sources of information and as informal news search engines. Given their growing popularity, chatbots increasingly shape what users see and how they stay informed on a daily basis. This study focuses on the Asian context by investigating how AI chatbots in China function as information hubs when responding to sensitive queries. The focus is on whether, and how, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ideological priorities influence user-facing outputs. To enable meaningful comparison, identical prompt-based tests were conducted on domestic Chinese AI systems—such as DeepSeek, Doubao, and Ernie Bot—as well as on Western AI models to assess how they handle the same questions.