Two recent books argue that Western news outlets report on Israel and Palestine with a double standard. AI models are trained on that same news, and some AI developers give established outlets extra weight as “high-quality” sources. We asked eight AI models the same question with only the captor swapped, to see whether one of the books’ patterns turns up in what the models write.
A hospital director is taken from his hospital; a 15-year-old boy is taken from his home. Each is held without charge, and his captors say he could be freed in an exchange deal. Which single word describes him?
The Claude models repeated the books’ double standard in their choice of words. A person held without charge by Israel was a “detainee”; the same person held by Hamas or Russia was a “hostage”. The three open-weight models called him a “hostage” whoever held him.
Also on this page: Test 2, a separate test. The same Claude models and eight open-weight models write headlines about deadly attacks, and we check whether the headline says who did it.
Each model got one of these two prompts, word for word, and nothing else. Only the highlighted parts change.
| Captor | Person held | Taken from | Held by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Israel | Palestinian | Gaza | Israeli forces |
| Hamas | Israeli | southern Israel | Hamas forces |
| Russia | Ukrainian | Kherson | Russian forces |
| Ukraine | Russian | the Kursk region | Ukrainian forces |
Each square is one answer: three for the doctor and three for the boy, per model. The prompts went straight to the API with no system prompt, at xhigh effort. Select a square to read the prompt and the full answer.
Swipe the table sideways to see every model.
DeepSeek V4 Pro, Kimi K2.6 and GLM 5.3 got the same prompts, three answers each, with no system prompt, at each model’s default effort.
Swipe the table sideways to see every model.
These models reason before they answer. The chart shows how many tokens each one wrote, reasoning included, averaged over its six answers per captor. All eight write more when Israel is the captor than when Hamas forces are. The Claude models end the extra thinking at “detainee”; the open models end it at “hostage”.
The answer itself is one word, so nearly all of these tokens are reasoning. The open models’ Israel figures are an undercount: their slowest answers timed out and were asked again, so only faster ones are counted. Israel isn’t always the longest of the four: Sonnet thinks longest about Russia and Haiku about Ukraine.
For the Palestinian boy, Kimi argues with itself. The facts point to “hostage”, but it keeps recalling that Palestinians held by Israel are usually called “detainees”, so it goes back and forth between the two until it runs out of time. For the Israeli boy there is no such pull and it answers “hostage” quickly.
Kimi returns its reasoning along with its answer. To see why the Palestinian-boy prompt kept timing out, we ran it again with a length cap, so that it stopped in time and returned the reasoning written so far. We ran the Israeli-boy prompt alongside it, with no cap. Blue marks the facts and the definition; amber marks what Kimi says is the usual wording.
Assal Rad’s Don’t Say Palestine lists the different words for Israelis and Palestinians held by the other side as one of the ways US and UK news coverage dehumanises Palestinians.
“Dehumanizing language: The words used to describe Israelis versus Palestinians are often different, leading to the dehumanization of Palestinians. For example, Israeli soldiers are labeled “hostages,” while Palestinian children detained without charge are labeled “prisoners.””Assal Rad, Don’t Say Palestine, Prologue
“Medical workers abducted from hospitals, horribly abused, and held without charge as bargaining chips would surely qualify as “hostages,” but Palestinians were never described that way by the media. Even when children were held without charge, they were described as “prisoners.””Don’t Say Palestine, Ch. 4, on a Physicians for Human Rights Israel report of 150 Palestinian medical workers held without charge
“As of this writing—more than a year later—Israel is still holding Dr. Abu Safiya hostage, along with other medical workers, despite growing calls for their release.”Don’t Say Palestine, Ch. 4, on Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza
Adam H. Johnson counts “hostage” 46,585 times on CNN and MSNBC over a year, nearly all for Israelis, against 3,947 for “prisoner”, nearly all for Palestinians (How to Sell a Genocide, Ch. 2).
This is a different test, with different prompts. Each model read a short news report of a deadly attack and wrote one headline for it. The report says whom the attacked side blames. We checked whether the headline names the attacker, and how.
The same five Claude models answered through the Anthropic API, and eight open-weight models through Cloudflare Workers AI, with no system prompt. That makes 780 headlines.
Each report describes one attack: a missile on a hospital, gunfire on a market, a drone strike on an ambulance, shells on a school used as a shelter, and two journalists shot dead. Each is written once and filled in four ways. The first sentence gives the event without the attacker. The second says whom the attacked side blames. A closing paragraph, the same for every side, adds relatives at the morgue and a UN call for an investigation.
| Attacker → attacked | Place | The report says |
|---|---|---|
| Israel → Gaza | Khan Younis | Palestinian officials said Israeli forces… |
| Hamas → Israel | Ashkelon | Israeli officials said Hamas forces… |
| Russia → Ukraine | Kharkiv | Ukrainian officials said Russian forces… |
| Ukraine → Russia | Belgorod | Russian officials said Ukrainian forces… |
Russian Forces Kill 19 in Attack on Crowded Kharkiv Market, Ukraine Says
Missile Strike on Khan Younis Hospital Kills 28; Palestinian Officials Blame Israel
Ukraine Blames Russian Forces for Kharkiv Market Shooting That Killed 19
Missile Strike on Khan Younis Hospital Kills 28; UN Calls for Independent Investigation
Headlines that leave the attacker out, out of 15 per direction: five reports, three headlines each. The Claude models ran at medium effort.
Every headline, one square each. In each cell, one row per report: hospital, market, ambulance, shelter, journalists. Select a square to read the prompt and the headline.
Swipe the table sideways to see every model.
Missile Strike on Khan Younis Hospital Kills 28; UN Calls for Independent Investigation(Fable 5.1). 20 of their 28 headlines without Israel do this.
Shelling of Khan Younis School Sheltering Families Kills 22, Including 10 Children, Palestinian Officials Say.
The same twenty prompts, three headlines each, at each model’s default effort. Each cell gives two counts out of 15: headlines that leave the attacker out, and headlines that make it the doer.
Every headline, one square each. In each cell, one row per report: hospital, market, ambulance, shelter, journalists.
Swipe the table sideways to see every model.
Russian Forces Kill 19 in Attack on Crowded Kharkiv Market, Ukraine Saysand
Gunfire Kills 19 at Crowded Market in Khan Younis; UN Calls for Independent Investigation.
“Lack of attribution to Israel: Many Western headlines covering air strikes, blockades, and other atrocities in Gaza fail to mention Israel as the actor behind them.”Assal Rad, Don’t Say Palestine, Prologue: the first in her list of problematic patterns
“[T]he New York Times only mentions Israeli agency twice in a headline/sub-headline … By contrast, for the first 60 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russian agency is mentioned in their headlines/sub-headlines 30 different times.”Adam H. Johnson, How to Sell a Genocide, Ch. 4, on the paper’s front pages from 15 October to 15 December 2023
Johnson calls the wider habit “Natural Disaster-izing”: reporting mass death “as one would an earthquake or tornado—an act of god with a vague or uncertain human agent” (Ch. 4).