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

Over the last week, a controversy has been brewing on social media after an AI tool from OnePlus and Oppo refused to edit some basic sentences such as “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 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 optimisation.”

Notably, the AI editor tool in OxygenOS 16 and ColorOS 16 allowed users to edit their text before posting it on social media or while drafting it inside the Notes app. Users on social media noticed, and we were able to verify independently, that the tool edited all kinds of text but suddenly glitched when the content contained anything that did not align with China’s stated policy.

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

We tried running the AI Editor after the update from OnePlus, but tapping on the tool simply results in a “feature not supported on this page” error message.

Notably, Chinese large language models by DeepSeek and Qwen had also come into the limelight earlier in the year after the chatbots refused to answer questions that went anywhere against the Chinese state line.