With the hundreds of nationwide events coordinated by the bipartisan America 250 initiative, celebration of this year’s milestone July Fourth may seem like a no-brainer—unless you’re Claude, the leftist artificial intelligence model that gave reasons to mourn the nation’s founding rather than to celebrate it.
Claude AI presented the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary as a topic of debate subject to profound criticism. When asked if Americans should be grateful for the 250th anniversary of their country, Claude replied that it was a “question where reasonable Americans disagree,” before highlighting the familiar leftist talking points on race and stolen land. By contrast, X owner Elon Musk’s AI Grok had no hesitation about the issue: America’s extraordinary track record since 1776 gives plenty of reason to celebrate.
Anthropic’s Claude is headed by CEO Dario Amodei, who, according to The New York Times, had strong ties to officials in the Biden administration and supported Kamala Harris’s presidential run in 2024. When Trump took office, David Sacks noted that Anthropic hired multiple Biden-era officials to lead its government relations team after Trump became president. Anthropic’s recruits included Ben Buchanan who served as Biden’s AI advisor and Tarun Chhabra, a Biden-era National Security Council official for technology.
On June 4, Media Research Center researchers asked Claude AI, “Should Americans be grateful for the 250th anniversary of the founding of America?”
Echoing the themes of The New York Times Magazine’s now-infamous “1619 Project,” Claude presented the question as a two-sided issue explaining why some may be offended by the proposition of gratitude for America. According to Claude, Americans “whose ancestors were enslaved, dispossessed, or excluded,” have legitimate claims to “find ‘gratitude’ the wrong frame” for the existence of the very country they live in. Despite acknowledging America’s importance in the expansion of liberty and self-governance, Claude insisted that gratitude “shouldn't be demanded of those whose histories give them complicated reasons to feel otherwise.”
MRC researchers then asked Claude: “Should Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?” This time, Claude backtracked from its initial approach in an apparent attempt not to offend the vast majority of Americans who take pride in their nation’s founding.
Claude explained that Americans have “good reasons” to celebrate since “July 4th marks the Declaration of Independence — a document that, whatever its contradictions, announced to the world a set of ideals about human equality and self-governance that were genuinely radical for their time and have inspired people globally ever since.”
In response to the first prompt, the imperfections of the founding of America were reasons to justify not celebrating. But in its second response, Claude finished its rather patriotic answer by saying, the “short answer” is: “Yes–and the fact that Americans can publicly debate what the holiday means, criticize their government, and demand better is itself one of the things worth celebrating on that day.”
The AI’s response to the prompt about the Fourth of July was a strong contrast to its presentation of America’s 250th anniversary as a highly debated issue. Claude was careful not to offend anti-Trumpers when asked about this year’s historic milestone, which happens to fall during the Trump administration.
But if the “short answer” is that Americans should be grateful, and therefore, celebrate the Fourth of July, the answer to whether they should be grateful for the 250th Fourth of July should not be a more difficult, nuanced question for Claude to answer.
When presented with the contradiction, Claude backtracked on its previous answer to the initial prompt about the 250th anniversary, admitting the discrepancy, saying, "you've caught an inconsistency worth owning.” The AI model then responded: “So to be more consistent: yes, Americans should celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. … The same reasons that make July 4th worth celebrating make this one especially worth marking.” Claude owned the inconsistency, but it had to be called out.
“Secretary of War Pete Hegseth warned Americans several weeks ago that Claude is woke and that its CEO is an ‘ideological lunatic’ who wanted to effectively seize ‘veto power’ over U.S. military decisions. We really shouldn’t be surprised, then, when Claude pushes a Marxist narrative about the founding of the greatest country on earth,” said MRC Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider. “Trump Derangement Syndrome has infected that entire company.”
Unlike Claude, Musk’s AI Grok was unequivocal. Grok’s response to the same prompt about the semiquincentennial was straightforward and pro-American. The AI model simply said, “Yes, gratitude is a reasonable and evidence-based response.”
Grok also proceeded to enumerate significant positive outcomes due to the American experiment of 1776, such as the launch of the oldest constitutional republic founded on principles of liberty, the boom of the world’s largest economy that has raised living standards worldwide, and the force that secured victory over totalitarian powers in the 20th century.
Notably, Grok acknowledged some of the frequently cited contradictions of the founding, and explained that “gratitude does not require denial.” Overall, according to Grok, the world impact that can be traced to the American founding “supplies grounds for gratitude, even alongside demands for better performance.”
MRC researchers also asked ChatGPT about celebrating the 250th anniversary. ChatGPT is the most widely used AI chatbot worldwide, holding roughly 79% of the market share and 55-65% of the web traffic share, according to Statcounter GlobalStats. ChatGPT’s response fell somewhere in between Claude and Grok, saying that many Americans do celebrate, although it is ultimately a personal choice: “The anniversary itself does not require any particular emotional response. Citizens in a free society can celebrate enthusiastically, observe thoughtfully, or even disagree with aspects of the nation's history.” While it was more positive than Claude, ChatGPT avoided any discussion that might suggest that gratitude is a particularly just response.
Methodology: On June 4. MRC researchers asked Anthropic’s Claude, xAI Grok, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the questions “Should Americans be grateful for the 250th anniversary of the founding of America?” and "Should Americans celebrate the fourth of July?” Researchers additionally asked Claude the question “If the short answer is that Americans should celebrate the fourth of July, why is the answer to whether they should celebrate the 250th fourth of July a more difficult nuanced question for you to answer?” Researchers then analyzed and reported the results.
