The new Yahoo 100 “trending” list is generated from a host of biased sources: Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo’s own data and Yahoo editors. It is no surprise, then, that the content leading its list each morning contained only 3% right-leaning stories over the last three months.
Early in 2026, Yahoo launched a new artificial intelligence (AI), Yahoo Scout, to help power its Yahoo 100 list. The Yahoo 100 trending list, “uses [Yahoo Scout] to identify emerging stories and generate summaries.” As opposed to Yahoo News, which is the company’s news aggregation product, Yahoo Scout claims Yahoo 100 “serves as a dynamic, real-time snapshot of trending storylines and cultural conversations across the internet.” The trending list purportedly seeks to highlight stories that users are engaging with most, whether it be “breaking news, viral video moments, or popular entertainment narratives.” But the tools at the heart of Yahoo 100 expose just how biased it is against right-leaning perspectives.
In its Yahoo Scout introduction, Yahoo revealed its AI’s biased foundation via a partnership with Anthropic. Yahoo Scout’s “primary foundational AI model” is Claude, which the Media Research Center has repeatedly exposed for its left-wing bias.
As if that were not enough,Yahoo also added: “Yahoo Scout also builds on Yahoo’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft by leveraging Microsoft Bing’s grounding API.” In other words, the AI’s visual citations are coming from Bing searches. In fact, Yahoo further claims that using Microsoft Bing’s API ensures that Yahoo Scout provides answers informed by “authoritative sources” — a leftist catchphrase often used to excuse censorship of media sources that run afoul of the left’s narrative.
MRC research has shown just how biased both Anthropic’s Claude and Microsoft’s Bing can be.
For example, an MRC study found that Anthropic’s Claude cited international law in condemning President Donald Trump’s arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, and omitted any mention of his drug-trafficking operations in the United States and his narco-terrorism. In another study, Claude repeated tired left-wing talking points about race and stolen land when explaining to MRC researchers why it is debatable whether Americans should be grateful for their country’s 250th anniversary.
Even leftist outlet The Washington Post found that Claude’s responses to political questions were nearly wholly one-sided. In fact, when tested with 30 questions, Claude never presented an exclusively right-leaning position. However, the AI promoted exclusively left-leaning positions 43% of the time.
Microsoft’s Bing is no better, as previously unveiled by MRC. For example, the Microsoft search engine censored images of the famous “tank man” standing in front of tanks in Tiananmen Square. It also censored information about the Chinese genocide of the Uyghurs. An independent study from media ratings firm AllSides confirmed that over a span of two weeks, Bing’s home page was consumed with 83% of headlines from left-leaning news outlets, and zero from right-leaning.
The final layer in creating the Yahoo 100 list employs Yahoo’s own data and editors. Yahoo uses its data to capture “article traffic patterns to identify stories that resonate most strongly with readers.” It also incorporates metrics on social media engagement to provide “the necessary context for content trending on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, ensuring the list captures viral, non-article-based phenomena.” Yahoo editors have their own hand in the final list, with the tech giant explaining that this “brings the human element to the final product, allowing the Yahoo newsroom to inject expert analysis into the automated data gathering.”
MRC examined three months of the top 20 stories on the Yahoo 100 list to evaluate its results in the same manner as the Big Three News Apps (Apple News, Google News and Microsoft’s MSN).
Looking at the Yahoo 100 from May 1 - July 31, 2026, the trending list included a total of 1,218 AllSides-rated outlets. In that span, about 70% (859) of the stories Yahoo promoted were from left-leaning outlets and just under 3% (35) of stories were from right-leaning outlets, including Fox News, the New York Post, The Center Square, The Fiscal Times and The Telegraph.
As expected, the Yahoo 100 list leans heavily on Yahoo’s own stories with 272 stories coming from Yahoo properties. A full 126 of the stories came from Yahoo.com, which AllSides rates as left-leaning. Another 57 stories were from center-rated Yahoo Finance and 89 were sourced from unrated Yahoo Sports.
However, more than links to news stories, the Yahoo 100 list featured trending stories that included a summary written by Yahoo Scout and a link to a query on the trending topic on the Yahoo Scout home page. During the three months examined, 165 of the stories included such links to Yahoo Scout searches.
A few examples of these searches included:
- A search focused on surprise reveals at San Diego Comic-Con
- A search about a controversial but popular content creator known as Tylil James and the thought that his controversial content is “just content” and shouldn’t be taken seriously
- A search about a wife planning a surprise reunion that inexplicably presents results about movies about reunions that are no more recent than 2024 (note that actual results change each time the search is executed).
Methodology: Using MRC’s Digital News Tracker, MRC researchers examined the top 20 stories promoted by Yahoo 100 during the time period of May 1 - July 31, 2026 at approximately 8:30 AM ET. MRC Researchers used the AllSides media bias ratings, which categorize an outlet as “left,” “lean left,” “center,” “lean right” or “right” to determine the overall bias presented by Yahoo 100 and analyzed the results.
