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Meta, Amazon and Google accused of 'distorting' key AI rankings

A test of AI model performance across the industry is being gamed by technology giants, making objective scientific comparison impossible, researchers have claimed

By Matthew Sparkes

1 May 2025

AI models go head-to-head in Chatbot Arena

Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

An industry-standard league table for ranking artificial intelligence models is being deliberately distorted by technology giants, researchers have claimed, leading to a misleading picture of which AIs are the best.

Sara Hooker at Cohere Labs, a US non-profit, and her colleagues claim to have found that the popular Chatbot Arena benchmark is a “distorted playing field”, with policies that end up giving an advantage to large companies like Meta, Amazon and Google by allowing them to discard models that score poorly.

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