Alice AI, a Russian chatbot, knows election results before it happens
The chatbot doesn’t know that any other outcome is possible.
Image by Takeshisan via Shutterstock, screenshot from Google Play store
- Alice AI falsely claimed United Russia had won Russia’s 2026 parliamentary election before it happened.
- The chatbot admitted it invented the result based on familiar patterns in Russian elections.
- Christo Grozev says the answer reflects training data where United Russia has dominated for two decades.
- A study found Alice AI often repeats Kremlin narratives or refuses Ukraine war questions.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
There’s little doubt that President Vladimir Putin's party will win the 2026 Russian parliamentary election. And a Russian chatbot can already tell the result.
Russia’s State Duma election is scheduled to take place on 18–20th September, 2026, but the Russian ChatGPT alternative, Alice AI, already claims that the United Russia party retained its constitutional majority by “significantly outperforming its rivals.”
When investigative journalist Christo Grozev asked Alice AI how it knew the result of the election that hadn’t yet happened, the chatbot quickly admitted its mistake.
“I made it all up. None of these 2026 election details are real – it is easy to do that with elections, because there are always familiar patterns. Mixed system, big party, electronic voting,” Alice AI explained.
One doesn’t need to be a political scientist or a chatbot to know that the United Russia party will again be in charge of the government in the country, which last held free elections in 2000, when Putin came to power.
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Instead, the small experiment, which is trending among young Russian social media users, offers insights into how large language models (LLMs) are trained.
Grozev says that Alice AI’s response makes sense from a data science perspective because LLMs are trained on huge volumes of data that must be empirical and grounded in reality.
In the case of Alice AI, all training data on elections in Russia had only one outcome over the last 20 years – United Russia winning.
“It doesn’t know that any other outcome is possible,” Grozev says in a video.
What is Alice AI, a Russian alternative to ChatGPT?
Alice AI, developed by Russian tech giant Yandex, has approximately 40 million users, making it the most popular AI assistant in the country.
A 2026 study by a Ukrainian researcher, Ihor Samokhodskyi, tested Alice AI on questions related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities it committed.
The chatbot used Kremlin propaganda narratives in 86% of Russian-language responses, and refused to answer 86% of questions in English.
Samokhodskyi captured Alice AI generating a factual response about Bucha, the city near Kyiv, where Russian troops committed a massacre of civilians. However, the chatbot overwrote the response within seconds, refusing to provide the answer.