OnePlus and Oppo AI refuses to answer ‘Is Arunachal Pradesh a part of India?’; company responds

Over the last week, a controvery has been brewing on social media after an AI tool from OnePlus and Oppo refused to edit some basic sentences like Is Arunachal Pradesh a part of India. While there is still no official response from Oppo on what went wrong, OnePlus has called the issue a ‘technical glitch’ in an official community post and says that it has launched an internal investigation to find the cause of the problem

In a community post, the company said, “Over the past two days, we received reports regarding technical inconsistencies with the AI Writer in the OnePlus Notes app. We promptly launched an internal investigation and shared an early update yesterday outlining our hybrid AI architecture and our collaboration with global model partners.”

“As the issue requires more time to address, we’re temporarily disabling the AI Writer in Notes to ensure a consistent user experience while we refine the underlying technical issue. OnePlus remains committed to delivering Community-first technology, and any unexpected behaviour is unintentional.” it added

When asked about the issue by Mint, OnePlus responded, “ We are aware of a technical issue with the AI Writer feature and have temporarily taken it offline for urgent repair and optimization.”

Notably, the AI editor tool in OxygenOS 16 and ColorOS 16 allowed users to edit their text before posting them on social media or when drafting it inside the Notes app. Users on social media noticed, and we were able to verify it on our own, that the tool edited all kinds of texts but suddenly glitched when the text contained anything that didn't go with China's stated policy.

In case you aren't aware, China claims that Arunachal Pradesh is a part of southern Tibet and calls it "Zangnan". The claims have obviously been refusted by the Indian government who have said that “invented names” do not change the ground reality that the north eastern state has been ruled under continuous and effective Indian administration for decades.

OnePlus does not reveal what AI it uses for the AI Editor tool but the absurdity in the recent answer strongly points to the use of a Chinese large language model (LLM) like DeepSeek or Qwen, given that these tools have also been known to refuse to answer any questions that go beyond the Chinese state line.

We tried running the AI Editor after the udpate from OnePlus and tapping on the tool simply results in the ‘feature not supported on this page’ error message.