Impartial Intelligence? Evidence of Country-Label Sensitivity in AI Financial Analysis

This study examines whether large language models exhibit systematic country-contingent differential treatment in financial fraud detection. Analyzing 30,000 synthetic transactions with identical statistical properties across three country attributions (United States, Great Britain, and China), we find LLMs assign significantly higher fraud probabilities to Chinese-attributed transactions (36.2%) compared to Western countries (≈30–31%), resulting in accuracy disparities of 67% versus 74%. The gap remains stable across five independent experimental replications and persists when using Chinese language prompts, ruling out linguistic effects. Bias mitigation strategies, such as requiring explanations or explicit country neutrality instructions, reduce but fail to eliminate these disparities. Testing across alternative models (Llama, DeepSeek) confirms the persistence of these effects across different LLMs. These results provide evidence that an LLM’s learned associations can override objective data, highlighting the need for systematic auditing to ensure equitable outcomes in cross-border AI applications.