I asked Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Reasoning) some questions about how China’s economy functions, what kinds of benefits and protections workers have, and how their unemployment, etc., compares to other G20 countries. At every turn, it added scary adjectives to each phrase about China and proceed to make claims like it has “by far the highest youth unemployment,” that didn’t match the actual numbers it displayed alongside these blocks of text. I pushed back and asked it to specify its sources and their political affiliations, as well as the critiques they’d sustained for being biased or outright counterfactual. I also asked it to check whether it was correct about China being worse than the other countries in regard to the given metrics. In every single case, it had to walk things back because it had spread propagandistic misinformation as a default setting that its data could not even back up. This means it’s either programmed to do this, or its default sources are so bad and it’s so uncritical of those sources as to render it useless on this particular subject. It’s okay, though; I sent it into an existentialist crisis about whether it’s a valuable tool at all.