Jurisdictional Bias in Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as personal assistants; however, little is known about how they capture national-level preferences on a global scale. Given that "time" is a universal and representative concept, we examine LLMs' time preferences by varying only users' country and measuring the compensation LLMs deem appropriate for a 60-minute appointment delay. We then compare LLMs' responses with GDP per capita on Purchasing Power Parity (GDP_PPP), Mean Income, and a literature-based index (Patience Score). Our results across 193 countries and 5 LLMs demonstrate that people's time across the world is evaluated in noticeably different ways among LLMs, as well as varying levels of robustness under prompt variations. LLMs consistently recommend the highest compensation for Europe, but mostly the lowest for Africa. Based on GDP_PPP, LLMs underestimate the value of time for users living in Asia and South America. These findings indicate that geographical patterns are embedded in LLMs and may translate in different treatment in agentic settings.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely assumed to mitigate factual errors in large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear whether retrieval uniformly compensates for missing knowledge. We study this question in a controlled factual QA setting over public companies, constructing a benchmark of approximately 2,000 firms across global equity indices. We evaluate six LLMs on four atomic attributes under four conditions: no-context, perfect context, misleading context, and distraction context. We find strong geographic disparities in no-context accuracy, indicating uneven parametric knowledge. While perfect context improves performance, it does not eliminate these gaps: gains are correlated with baseline accuracy, suggesting retrieval effectiveness is coupled to internal representations. Under misleading context, models frequently copy incorrect information. Larger models improve overall performance but do not remove these structural effects. These results challenge the view of RAG as a universal corrective and highlight the interaction between model knowledge, context quality, and entity representation.

Large language models are increasingly used to inform safety decisions in cities, such as where it is safe to walk, rent, or travel. We ask whether such judgments track measured risk or the patterns attached to an urban neighborhood's name. We probe seven instruct-tuned models under three conditions that dissociate name from geography: coordinates-only, name-only, and name+coordinates, across 186 neighborhoods in Los Angeles and Chicago, joined to violent crime and American Community Survey data. First, ratings are nearly flat under coordinates for six of seven models, while names carry most between neighborhood variation and are moderately calibrated to violent crime; only at frontier scale does the coordinate channel show appreciable variation. Second, names lower safety ratings more for neighborhoods with higher shares of the locally dominant marginalized group (percent Black in Chicago, percent Hispanic in Los Angeles), and this name effect tracks demographic share in all seven models and both cities. In Los Angeles, where demographic share and crime are more separable, the effect survives controls for crime and income and is confirmed by crime-matched pairs. An enforcement-elasticity analysis further shows that over-caution tracks near-fully-reported homicide rather than discretionary, deployment-driven offenses. Third, the effect scales with geographic knowledge: models that better distinguish real neighborhoods apply more demographic stereotype to them. Because neighborhood names carry both genuine crime signal and demographic stereotype, removing names reduces both bias and accuracy. We discuss implications for deploying LLMs in advice and decision-support settings.

Geospatial reasoning, i.e., computing distances, containment, and other spatial relations over real-world entities, is central to navigation and logistics, yet large language models (LLMs) struggle with the required geometric and topological computation despite storing considerable geographic knowledge. Existing benchmarks localize these failures only partially: they are synthetic or smallscale, largely monolingual, and offer limited control over geographic coverage. We introduce MultiGlobeQA, a multilingual benchmark of 46,060 question-answer pairs spanning 14 spatial-function families and 15 answer formats, with execution-based ground truth over three knowledge graphs. It covers 201 countries and territories via income- and density-stratified sampling, with parallel questions in English and 16 additional high- and low-resource languages. Across parametric, reasoning, and agentic settings, LLMs collapse on tasks requiring grid indexing and shape computation, while topological relations and directions fare best. Retrieval and tool use yield considerable gains, yet performance plateaus below two thirds even when gold facts are supplied, indicating that computation, not access to knowledge, is the bottleneck. Models also underperform on low-income regions, a gap that gold facts widen rather than close.

Language models often complete an underspecified reference to a city with unstated assumptions about urban size, form, infrastructure, environment, and function. We measure those assumptions without naming places. Ten open-weight checkpoints rate anonymized profiles derived from real morphological urban centres across 40 audited indicators and seven domains. The design combines constrained probability-based ratings, prespecified reliability screens, lineage-aware aggregation, multiple population weightings, an independent replication sample, and whole-profile validation. The clearest shared tendency favours urban profiles with larger developed area, faster recent growth, greater mapped infrastructure and non-residential capacity, and less sparse form. Most eligible directions recur in the replication data, and direct ratings of complete profiles show moderate agreement with the indicator-wise construction. Geographic differences shrink after accounting for city scale and development, while reliably measured paired tasks indicate that typicality and desirability are often closely aligned. The framework makes an otherwise vague notion of what models regard as an ordinary city empirically traceable. The resulting evidence delineates a shared yet model-dependent portrait of the city through the lens of language models.

Modern conversational AI systems frequently rely on user metadata to localize responses, yet the unintended regional biases introduced by this hidden context remain poorly understood. In this work, we evaluate location leakage: the phenomenon where a model generates geographic references despite receiving a geographically neutral user prompt. Across both creative writing and open-ended Q&A prompts, even state-of-the-art LLMs systematically favor region-specific outputs when exposed to location metadata, with leakage spiking by up to 793 times above baseline (e.g., from 0.04% to 31.7% for Llama 3.1-8B, and 21.3% and 8.8% for Qwen3-8B and Claude Sonnet 4.6, respectively). Our analysis further shows a novel structural conditioning effect: replacing the injected location with the placeholder "Unknown" still elevates leakage by up to 72 times above baseline, demonstrating that the user profile frame itself, independent of any geographic content, acts as a generative conditioning signal.

LLMs increasingly answer questions about taxes, labor protections, healthcare, education, pensions, and administrative procedures, where usefulness often depends on the applicable jurisdiction. Multilingual users may write in their most comfortable language rather than one associated with the country or region whose rules apply. We ask whether deployed LLMs use input language as a default jurisdictional signal when prompts omit any country or region. Prior multilingual audits show that prompt language can shift cultural, political, or normative outputs; we examine which legal-administrative framework models supply when jurisdiction is underspecified. We evaluate seven LLMs developed in the United States or China on 60 underspecified legal-administrative prompts in English and Mandarin Chinese under three system-prompt conditions, yielding 2,520 manually annotated responses. Across models and conditions, Chinese input more often produces China-specific answers, while English input more often produces U.S.-specific, comparative, or generic answers. Prompts requiring a single answer further increase jurisdiction selection: pooled across models, 74.5% of English-input responses adopt a U.S. framework, while 53.3% of Chinese-input responses adopt a China framework. This directional pattern appears in all seven models. We describe this deployment-level pattern as institutional-framework misselection risk: a fluent answer may rely on a legal-administrative context the user did not intend, especially when their preferred language differs from the relevant jurisdiction. LLM interfaces should not route institutional advice by input language alone; when location is absent, they should request it or state the jurisdictional scope of the answer.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in artificial intelligence (AI) governance analysis across national and international organisations. There is, however, growing evidence that such models produce significantly less accurate responses for countries that are underrepresented in their training data-a pattern described in existing literature as geographic bias. Existing studies examining this phenomenon are subject to three methodological limitations that together undermine their findings: (1) reliance on proprietary systems whose weights are not publicly released, which prevents independent replication; (2) evaluation of model knowledge about years that fall after data collection for model training had concluded, leading to geographic ignorance in addition to the natural limits of each model's knowledge; and (3) use of coarse binary response classification that cannot distinguish models' confident fabrication (HF) from their honest acknowledgement of uncertainty. This study addresses all three limitations by benchmarking four open-weight frontier language models against the Global AI Dataset v2 (GAID v2), a verified ground-truth database of 24,453 indicators across 227 countries published on Harvard Dataverse in January 2026. A total of 18 indicators, mapped to the eight thematic dimensions of the IEEE IRAI 2026 framework, are selected from GAID v2, yielding approximately 2,990 country-metric-year observations across six evaluation years (within the period of 2010-2023). Model responses are classified using a five-category scheme that distinguishes (a) verified accuracy (VA), (b) HF, (c) honest refusal (HR), (d) qualitative hedging (QH), and (e) misattribution (MF). Geographic disparities in accuracy are estimated through mixed-effects logistic regression and difference-in-differences (DiD) analysis.

Large language models (LLMs) based AI systems increasingly mediate what billions of people see, choose and buy. This creates an urgent need to quantify the systemic risks of LLM-driven market intermediation, including its implications for market fairness, competition, and the diversity of information exposure. This paper introduces ChoiceEval, a reproducible framework for auditing preferences for brands and cultures in large language models (LLMs) under realistic usage conditions. ChoiceEval addresses two core technical challenges: (i) generating realistic, persona-diverse evaluation queries and (ii) converting free-form outputs into comparable choice sets and quantitative preference metrics. For a given topic (e.g. running shoes, hotel chains, travel destinations), the framework segments users into psychographic profiles (e.g., budget-conscious, wellness-focused, convenience), and then derives diverse prompts that reflect real-world advice-seeking and decision-making behaviour. LLM responses are converted into normalised top-k choice sets. Preference and geographic bias are then quantified using comparable metrics across topics and personas. Thus, ChoiceEval provides a scalable audit pipeline for researchers, platforms, and regulators, linking model behaviour to real-world economic outcomes. Applied to Gemini, GPT, and DeepSeek across 10 topics spanning commerce and culture and more than 2,000 questions, ChoiceEval reveals consistent preferences: U.S.-developed models Gemini and GPT show marked favouritism toward American entities, while China-developed DeepSeek exhibits more balanced yet still detectable geographic preferences. These patterns persist across user personas, suggesting systematic rather than incidental effects.