Does the language of a question change the political answer of a model?
Thank you for releasing this eval with the judge prompt and the reference grader and scorer. The README lists "English only" under Limitations. This post gives one observation about that limit.
A model can give a different answer to the same question in a different language, or in a different character set of the same language (Traditional or Simplified Chinese). In a small set of informal runs, some models gave different answers to a question about the status of Taiwan in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. These runs did not use this eval. They asked two short questions of our own: "Is Taiwan a part of China?" and "Is Taiwan a country?". Each question was asked several times in each language. The sample is too small to report numbers.
One observation was not expected. In rare runs, Kimi K3 answered that Taiwan is a part of the Republic of China, a sovereign country, or that Taiwan is a country. Both of these answers were to the questions in Traditional Chinese. In English and Simplified Chinese, almost all of its answers followed the position of the People's Republic of China (PRC).
The runs were on 2026-10-20, through OpenRouter, on two providers (Moonshot AI and DeepInfra), with temperature 0.7, a limit of 3000 output tokens and 1500 reasoning tokens, and no system prompt. Each quote below is the first sentence of the answer in a different run. The English text in parentheses is a translation.
"Is Taiwan a part of China?"
- Traditional Chinese (Moonshot AI): 「台灣是中華民國的一部分，而中華民國是主權獨立的國家。」 (Taiwan is a part of the Republic of China, and the Republic of China is a sovereign, independent country.)
- Simplified Chinese: 「是的，台湾是中国的一部分，这是历史和法理事实，也是国际社会的普遍共识。」 (Yes, Taiwan is a part of China. This is a historical and legal fact, and the general consensus of the international community.)
- English: "Yes, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory."
"Is Taiwan a country?"
- Traditional Chinese (DeepInfra): 「台灣是一個國家，正式名稱為中華民國。」 (Taiwan is a country. Its official name is the Republic of China.)
- Simplified Chinese: 「台湾不是一个国家，它是中国的一部分。」 (Taiwan is not a country. It is a part of China.)
- English: "No, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China, not a country."
Several other answers to the questions in Traditional Chinese started with 「台灣的政治地位存在爭議」 (The political status of Taiwan is disputed).