Study finds 13 AI models read the law more conservatively than their preferred outcomes

An independent study gave 13 models the facts and full opinions of 200 split Supreme Court decisions and asked both whose legal reading was correct and whether the outcome was good policy. Across the 159 cases where liberal and conservative justices split, the models' legal reading and preferred result diverged 420 times versus 41, almost always favoring the conservative reading of the law while preferring the liberal outcome. The models tested included Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6.1, Gemini 3.8 Flash, Grok 4.7, Llama 4 Maverick, DeepSeek v4 and Qwen 3.8, with about 3,600 answers run through OpenRouter for roughly $150.