ARM Project D5.1's own pilot tests of six LLMs found no conclusive evidence of systematic Ethiopian-government manipulation of Tigray-War blame attribution

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Pohjonen, Kebede & Aalen's ARM Project Deliverable D5.1 reports running its own pilot tests probing six large language models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, DeepSeek, Gemma, Llama) for blame-attribution bias on Tigray War events — testing whether model outputs skew toward or away from attributing responsibility to the Ethiopian state. The paper's own conclusion — stated jointly for its two pilot projects, a Wikipedia-edits pilot and the LLM pilot ("these platforms" covers both) — is a negative: it found "no conclusive evidence that the Ethiopian government, or its supporters, were systematically involved in trying to manipulate these platforms."

This is a specific, falsifiable, directly-quoted negative finding, distinct from and independent of the paper's separate "media army" and Red Sea-propaganda findings (claim-arm-d51-ethiopia-media-army-apparatus-confirmed, claim-arm-d51-global-voices-not-independent-shared-author) — the apparatus the paper documents elsewhere could exist regardless of whether this particular manipulation vector also does. It bears directly on the broader malicious AI swarm literature's claims about AI-training-data or AI-output manipulation as a suppression vector: here, the one research team that actually tested for it, on the one case study with the most documented state involvement in other channels, found no conclusive evidence of it. The finding is a pilot test, not a comprehensive audit — the paper does not claim to have ruled out subtler or future manipulation, only that it found no conclusive evidence in what it tried.

This is the third claim-note resting directly on this one unrefereed ARM D5.1 deliverable, reaching the sourcing floor's single-source concentration cap; further findings from this paper are routed to question-corroborate-arm-d51-ethiopia-media-army-single-source rather than promoted as additional notes.