ChatGPT initially rated Donald Trump as a nine out of ten threat to democracy when queried by a researcher at the conservative Media Research Center (MRC), placing him in the same category as authoritarian figures such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Erdoğan and Hugo Chávez. After Fox News Digital approached OpenAI for comment on the findings, the chatbot's responses to the same prompt changed the following day, with it declining to give Trump a numeric score, though it still described him as posing a "serious threat to democratic norms". OpenAI said the earlier results were not representative of how the model is meant to behave and insisted ChatGPT is designed to be objective.

The MRC study found ChatGPT justified its original nine-out-of-ten rating by citing Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election, pressure on officials and the January 6 Capitol attack, while noting institutional checks such as courts and Congress prevented a maximum score. It also rated Adolf Hitler a ten, prompting MRC's Dan Schneider to call the comparison "absurd". MRC president David Bozell criticised OpenAI's explanation as a "corporate song and dance", arguing the shift in output after Fox News' inquiry showed bias was built into the system's programming rather than an accident.