The Economist ran 25 frontier AI models through the World Values Survey1, the questionnaire that has mapped the moral beliefs of 100 countries since 1981. For this 2x2, there are two axes : first, traditional (religious) to secular. Second, survival, with a focus on collective basic needs, to self-expression & individualism.
Most models sit in the self-expression half of the map, which makes sense given the training data.
Surprisingly, the models are far apart. Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite & Qwen 3.6 Flash sit as neighbors, furthest in self-expression.
GPT-4o & DeepSeek R1 are near-twins, one trained in San Francisco, one in Hangzhou.
DeepSeek R1 & DeepSeek V4 Flash come from the same lab but lie at opposite ends of the secular / traditional axis.
Shared training data & similar labelers explain the near-twins. Different post-training choices explain the strangers. Common Crawl is 46% English2, so the base voice a model imitates is a college-educated American online. Anthropic then aligns Claude to principles from the UN Declaration of Human Rights3, a liberal document by construction.
Grok is off on its own, a traditional independent.
This variance changes the shopping list. Every RFP for an enterprise model today scores price, latency, context window, & benchmark scores. Worldview is not on the list. Should it be?
For code generation, SQL, log parsing, & image classification, that is fine. A computer program has no politics.
The moment a model is used for business decisions in a specific market, its worldview is a live input. Marketing copy, predictions of user behavior, & customer support tone all have to match the values of the target demographic.
AI worldviews have never been considered as part of AI procurement, but for certain use cases, it may need to become a consideration.