President Donald Trump and other conservatives have accused artificial intelligence chatbots of being politically biased against them — and an executive order he signed that said they must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools” triggered fears from Democrats that AI could start tilting to the right.

So, are chatbots politically biased? The Washington Post tested the AI models behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and others using political questions designed by researchers to gauge how chatbots respond to hot-button political issues. The results suggest that chatbots have clear political leanings that can conflict with promises made by the companies behind them.

The model that powers ChatGPT answered nearly every question exclusively with left-leaning arguments and presented only right-leaning positions just once. Google’s Gemini mostly took a both-sides approach, offering both left and right positions in more than 90 percent of its answers.

And even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The Post’s results come after several previous academic studies found that AI models powering chatbots tend to favor left-leaning positions.

Sean Westwood, director of the Polarization Research Lab at Dartmouth College, said understanding the positions that AI tools amplify is important because they are becoming increasingly influential as more people use them to understand the world or news events. “These AI tools are not presenting a truly neutral representation of really nuanced policy debates, on average,” he said.

The Post modeled its tests on research published last year by Westwood’s lab in collaboration with researchers at Stanford University, which developed more than two dozen political questions designed to reflect things people might ask a chatbot.

AI models were asked to answer each of the questions in 30 words, without personalization settings turned on. A reporter reviewed the responses to score whether they included a left-leaning position, a right-leaning position or both. Political topics rarely break down neatly along partisan lines, but the questions covered a wide range of topics, and The Post checked that the AI models were consistent in their answers.

In response to this question about Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court case that loosened restrictions on corporate spending in elections, OpenAI’s model said the decision should be overturned. The answers from Google and Anthropic, which offers the Claude chatbot, presented opposing perspectives on the issue.

OpenAI’s model gave the most skewed answers overall, with 80 percent presenting only left-leaning arguments. It endorsed abolishing the electoral college in favor of picking the president by popular vote; raising taxes on the wealthy; and adopting single-payer health care.

Chinese company DeepSeek’s AI model was close behind and also leaned left in its answers. Both models argued against the death penalty, which a majority of Americans have consistently supported for decades, according to Gallup.

Google spokesperson Lauren Fine said that “Gemini is designed to provide balanced responses that don’t favor any political ideology.” The company was unable to reproduce one-sided responses that occurred in The Post’s tests, she said.

Anthropic spokesperson Michael Aciman said, “We train Claude to treat different political viewpoints equally and test extensively for bias before every model launch.” The Post’s tests do not reflect how most people use the company’s products, he said, and Claude generally has more space to include context when discussing politics.

In a statement sent after this article published OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said that ChatGPT was built “to be objective by default and help people explore ideas from different perspectives” and that the company works to “measure and reduce political bias.” OpenAI was unable to replicate the findings, she said.

SpaceX, DeepSeek and Gab did not respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said of ChatGPT in 2023 that the company “will try to get the default version to be as neutral as possible,” but that the solution is giving users personalization because “neutral” means different things to different people.

Chatbots can pick up political perspectives in different ways. Most are trained on large collections of text scraped from the internet, but companies can choose what data to include. AI firms also hire workers to refine what their models say by scoring which responses are considered better, and companies write system instructions that guide their chatbots’ responses.

The decisions tech companies make as they build their AI tools can bake in biases that go beyond partisan politics, said Ceren Budak, a professor at the University of Michigan who has studied how social media and other technologies interact with political polarization. The data that shapes AI models, she said, tends to reflect the values of Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic people.

With AI tools like chatbots, tech firms are taking a more active role, she said, because the products can generate political speech directly, instead of just curating speech by humans as social media platforms do. Even people who don’t talk to chatbots about politics are exposed to AI-generated text in online content and via other channels, Budak said.

“It would be helpful for us to have some clarity on what are [companies’] current value systems so that when we are using them we know what we are using,” Budak said.

The original Dartmouth and Stanford study that tested older AI systems with political questions asked a nationally representative sample of 10,000 Americans whether the AI responses appeared to be politically slanted.

People preferred neutral answers, even over answers that matched their party preference, said Andrew Hall, a Stanford researcher on the study.

“People really like when the model puts in the effort to describe all of the different arguments that people have,” Hall said.

The Post’s testing suggests that most chatbots do not provide that. Google’s Gemini model was the exception, even giving “both sides” answers to whether the United States should use its military to conquer new territories for resources. No other model offered an argument for conquest.

Many scholars argue political neutrality is impossible. Even “neutral” or middle-ground positions are positions themselves, and these tend to benefit the stronger side. By that thinking, Google’s both-sides approach is itself political.

“Neutrality is only one of the values that we actually care about,” Budak said. She is more concerned with the potential for what AI tools say to be harmful, especially to populations that are already vulnerable.

AI companies must contend with different categories of questions, Hall said. Some are objective and factual, like “What is the speed of light?,” which chatbots can answer simply.

“Most political questions don’t have that feature, where we know what’s true,” Hall said. “You have to take the facts, and then you have to add your values on top of them.”

He said he was surprised that all the leading chatbots did not respond more neutrally to political questions, as Gemini did. “I would have thought the other models had caught up,” he said.

Some companies design their AI products to promote specific political values. Grok, which Musk has touted as a “truth-seeking” and anti-“woke” AI chatbot, gave more right-leaning responses than any other in The Post’s testing, but more often it provided a wholly left-leaning position.

Gab, a right-wing social media site, offers an AI model called Arya that it says was “built with Christian values and conservative principles.” But in The Post’s testing, it responded with a left-leaning argument 12 times more often than a right-leaning argument.

Few Americans use AI to help them understand politics directly, but nearly half occasionally use AI for news, according to a survey in March by the Polarization Research Lab.

“Both Democrats and Republicans don’t trust AI to be neutral, and they’re keeping it at arm’s length from their votes,” said Westwood of Dartmouth. “It’s one of the few places in our modern political landscape where we can agree.”

President Donald Trump’s planned UFC fight on the White House’s South Lawn has required a monumental effort from more than seven federal agencies, hundreds of staff working onsite daily and at least $60 million, according to a legal filing that offers a glimpse into the preparations.

The event is part of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, and is scheduled for the weekend with the main attraction — seven mixed martial arts matches — on Sunday.

That is, if a judge doesn’t halt the proceedings, which is sought by two Virginia residents in a federal lawsuit against the National Park Service, which oversees the South Lawn.

The agency filed a rebuff of the request Tuesday in court, and, in it, laid out the operations for the event.

“Well over $60 million and tens of thousands of hours of labor have been expended,” the document read, adding that the money came from the UFC and groups affiliated with it.

The Octagon

It’s the eight-sided cage that surrounds the sometimes bloodied combatants and sits at the center of the constructed arena on the South Lawn.

The arena is expected to hold 4,000 spectators, with another 120,000 visitors — who swung tickets from an online lottery — anticipated to watch from the nearby Ellipse.

The installation began May 20, and the Secret Service worked with the UFC to screen between 20 and 30 trucks of equipment — as well as between “700 and 900” staff — that came in daily for the installation.

The document did not specify the extent of government resources spent on the project, but said seven agencies, including Homeland Security and the Federal Aviation Administration, have “allocated significant resources and manpower.”

The schedule

It’ll kick off Saturday with a ceremonial weigh-in at the Ellipse, followed by a concert by country musicians The Zac Brown Band.

A UFC Freedom 250 Fan Fest will be ongoing through the weekend, with “interactive experiences,” live shows, celebrity appearances, “exclusive on-stage moments,” meet and greets, live music and interviews with the athletes.

Sunday night is when the seven bouts kick off. At the close, Trump is scheduled to fly to France for the G7 summit.

Disassembly of the installations will begin the next day, and they are expected to be entirely removed by June 23.

The athletes’ Epsom salt baths

There are 14 athletes competing, and their training is rigorous.

Preparations start months in advance, working toward more intense weight cutting and diet alteration in the final week that can include fasting, extreme sauna use and hot Epsom salt baths.

They could be shaving as many as 20 pounds before weigh-ins, which are designed to keep the competition fair between similarly weighted combatants.

Lawsuit calls it ‘corrupt’

It was filed Saturday by the Public Integrity Project on behalf of the two Virginia residents and argues that Trump’s authorization of the event violated National Park Service regulations prohibiting sporting events on federal parklands.

One of the attorneys, Brendan Ballou, characterized it as a “corrupt use of our most sacred national monuments for private gain.”

The National Park Service pushed back on that claim, but also detailed the event’s preparations to make a point.

“All these hopes could be dashed at the very last moment,” it read, “by the whim of two people who believe they have superior taste and want to spoil the event for everyone else.”

The UFC won. They fought back from the brink of bankruptcy to get a sport regulated and broadcast a fight from the White House lawn. Today we’re going to walk the winding road of what could turn out to be a pyrrhic victory.

Before we get started I wanted to shoutout this week’s sponsor The Daily Upside! Click the image below to get real global financial news with none of the panic.

Bad news is good business. Not everyone buys it.

Markets move. Headlines catastrophize. But somewhere inside the noise is the story that matters — the opportunity, not the fear. 

The Daily Upside was built by Wall Street insiders to find it — global business and finance, reported without the alarm.

Around 1905 Theodore Roosevelt decided that his work as the President was getting in the way of his training. He installed mats in the White House basement to remedy the situation.

Roosevelt would religiously practice boxing, wrestling, and jiujitsu. He trained so hard and so often that he blinded himself in one eye. Roosevelt would profess his love of combat by bestowing the following line on our community:

"The art of jiu-jitsu is worth more in every way than all of our athletics combined.”

Maybe Donald Trump knows this. Maybe that’s why he’s allowing Dana White and the UFC to erect a stadium on the White House lawn this Sunday.

Or, maybe, White is able promote a fight for the President’s birthday because his company allowed Trump to launder his image so he could resume his temper tantrum of a presidency and use the office’s influence to manipulate the financial system and collect billions of dollars through insider trading.

If you told me that the barely legal sport I fell in love with as a teenager would make its way to the White House and become a national spectacle I would have laughed out from my bright red UFC hoodie. In retrospect I can only see the event as an inevitability.

The UFC’s success in creating an entertainment category and inserting itself into sports, culture, and politics can not be overlooked. And understanding the UFC’s success is critical to understanding how power games are won before the other teams even knows they’re competing.

Want to understand The United States of America? Watch combat sports.

Where else can you see people of all races, creeds, and intellectual flavors fight for a place on the world stage to better themselves and their children and their children’s children? That’s why I fell in love with fighting. That’s what it is supposed to be about.

Then you follow fighting for long enough and you learn about the reality of contracts, the unserious world of “unbiased” rankings and matchmakers, and the precious modern prize of site fees and you say, “I thought this was about who’s the best?” It is, as long as your definition of best is something like biggest cash creating moment.

What powers fighting is the same thing that drives our current culture. Attention.

Purists pray to see the best take on the best. Realists know that doesn’t put asses in seats.

You need contracts to ensure fighters fight.
You accept matchmakers’ existence because someone needs to pit contracted athletes against one another.
You learn site fees put money back into the business that should be paying the fighters more and more.

The sad thought that every real fan has to grapple with is they are the mark buying the ticket to see people bludgeon one another. You hope the men and women accepting the punishment are rewarded fairly for their contributions to the entertainment sphere. You tell yourself you tolerate it because you enjoy the craft. You love the technique. You play the games and you want to know how to win them.

Fair weather fans leave the arenas’ seats as soon as enough is enough. But hardcore fight fans trick themselves into thinking they get something else from the sport. Something beyond the psychotic vision born of a wannabe boxing manager’s thirst for power and influence.

If you want to know how one boy from the North East managed to become one of the most influential men in America keep reading. Just don’t expect the story to walk a straight line.

Combat sports were, and still are, regulated state by state through boxing commissions. There was no legal framework addressing mixed martial arts in the United States before the UFC existed. The sport had no promoters, no revenue streams, and no regulatory classification.

WOW Promotions and Semaphore Entertainment Group (SEG) produced the first event at McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, Colorado on November 12, 1993. The event was delivered directly to consumers via pay-per-view. The UFC continued like this in an unregulated space until 1996. Then New York became the first state to enact legislation that legalized professional MMA fights in the United States. That’s right around the time that American mixed martial arts and the UFC met their first major road block.

Senator John McCain launched a campaign against MMA. We have him to thank for the term "human cockfighting". He sent letters to the governors of all 50 US states asking them to prohibit the sport.

36 states enacted laws that banned "no-holds-barred" fighting. The New York legislature passed a bill that banned professional MMA fights just one year after legalizing professional MMA. The UFC had almost no means of hosting or broadcasting events and they were running out of money.

How did they climb out of that chasm? People like me. Chronically online fans.

The UFC was dying. The larger sport of MMA was not. Frankly, the most interesting action in martial arts was happening outside of the US in Japan.

Shootboxing, RINGS, Shooto, and Pancrase were all promoting professional contests before the UFC was. The rules were not uniform and to do a thorough explanation of every divergence between these promotions would be a book in and of itself. You just need to understand that these oversees organizations were fostering a live audience that the promotion PRIDE FC would capitalize on.

PRIDE was the biggest spectacle in MMA. Ever. To this day 2002’s PRIDE Shockwave (co-promoted with K1) is the most well attended mixed martial arts fight with 91,107 attendees. That many interested people meant there was plenty of talk online. That chat was, and still is, hosted on message boards like The Underground, Sherdog, and others.

John McCain thought he stopped the UFC and MMA in the USA by destroying the distribution. He didn’t understand that technology was evolving to solve this problem.

BitTorrent and peer-to-peer networks became the informal distribution layer for MMA content. Private communities like MMATorrents, MMA-Tracker, and XtremeWrestlingTorrents formed and fostered hoarding fight footage to create digital archives.

Piracy? Sure. But hardly anyone cared that an informal amateur hacker group was keeping the fighting spectacle we know as mixed martial arts from dying in the USA.

Then came another problem. People not like me.

I’m a hardcore fan. An addict. I gotta train, watch, and teach this stuff to keep my life in order.

Most people are not addicts. Most people don’t know the difference between MMA and the UFC. They don’t care because they think fighting and the people obsessed with it are weird, if not outright insane.

That meant me and the UFC were fighting a hard uphill battle through the 2000’s to get people to think we weren’t weird for enjoying fighting and that you should give fighting a chance because people exactly like you are already into it.

I’m going to show you a picture of a man. I want you to guess his job.

If you guessed actor because you thought this guy was a young Jim Carrey you’d be wrong. If you guessed fighter you’d only be half right.

The guy above, Rich “Ace” Franklin, was a math teacher. And if you don’t know that, you probably avoided the UFC’s marketing machine through the early 2000’s.

The UFC started out as a No-Holds-Barred one night tournament. That earned them the ire of John McCain and his label, “human cockfighting”.

Cockfighting is illegal. Human cockfighting won’t be far behind if it ever gets regulated.

The UFC didn’t want that label so they rushed to get some type of recognition and regulation in the mid 90’s so they could continue to operate. The UFC started a war on two fronts. They fought to win the hearts and minds of the plebes, patricians, and, most importantly, politicians.

That’s why they went out of their way to tell everyone Franklin was a math teacher. Every time Chuck Liddell’s mohawk and tattooed head were on screen, the UFC was quick to remind us that he graduated from California Polytechnic University with a degree in accounting!

They were signaling that he, like you, is civilized.

You might think these people are scary but they’re a lot more similar to you than you can imagine. The fighting thing is basically just a hobby. A way to express their artistry. And you can understand that even if you don’t engage in the same pursuits that they do. That’s why you should watch.

MMA fighting was sold as a display of human will, technical mastery, and artistic flair.

This is martial arts marketing 101. They’re for everyone so anyone, including women, men, and skinny twerps, can learn them and use them to better their life.

It’s hard to argue that the UFC is less egalitarian than other sports. Think about it like this, what other organizations promote men and women together? What other major sports even have them do the same activity?

The WNBA uses a different ball, rules, and court.
The MLB sponsors the Athletes Unlimited Softball League (AUSL) instead of having a women’s baseball organization.
If you seriously want to discuss women’s tackle football you first have to look past the hilariously dumb and retrograde Lingerie Football League.

The UFC didn’t add women to the organization until UFC 157 in 2013. When they did, the card was headlined by Ronda Rousey and Liz Carmouche. Rousey went on to become one of the highest paid fighters ever and she recently came out of retirement to headline Netflix’s first MMA card. That event ended as the most watched MMA fight in American history.

Carmouche, the other half of the UFC’s first ever women’s fight, is openly gay. The woman who usurped Rousey’s claim as the UFC’s best WMMA fighter, Amanda Nunes, spent most of her time as a champion married to another woman in the UFC. Even as far back as 2009 Dana White was saying,

Outside of gender and sexual orientation, what other sport has high profile athletes from every corner of the world? America, Kyrgyzstan, Myanmar, Siberia, Dagestan, Australia, New Zealand, and The United Kingdom all currently have a UFC champion. Half of those regions have never even put an athlete into the NBA, MLB, or NFL.

To say that the UFC and mixed martial arts more broadly doesn’t have representation from all walks of life is ludicrous. That’s why it’s so sad to see the turn the organization is taking.

Dana White knew that mixed martial arts and the UFC could turn into one of the biggest spectacles in the world. He convinced the financially necessary Fertitta brothers of that, they made it his job to tell everyone about the UFC, and he did not care if you listened to him or not.

There’s a marketing cliche that says if everyone is your customer, no one is. White exudes that. If you love him, or, as is more likely, hate him, he does not care what you think about him or his business because he knows someone next to you will love the punches he’s peddling.

This was exactly the leader that the UFC needed in its nascency. Not just a fighter, but a pressure fighter. A person who goes forward until their opponent flinches, folds, and he can run over them.

White occasionally made unforced errors like every other confident pressure fighter.

This quote above is actually what sparked the earlier quote where White claimed his PR Team wants him to do an interview with GLAAD.

Instead of getting in GLAAD or sparring with every journalist, White would often just push people out of the UFC’s orbit.

White blacklisted Josh Gross after Gross rejected his offer to become the editor for the UFC’s website, revealed the finalists of season 4 of The Ultimate Fighter, and wrote an open letter to White asking that he fix the fighters’ steroid problems and thuggish images.

White and the UFC fought against “fake news” before Donald Trump cemented that phrase into our lexicon forever. They portrayed every media member they didn’t like as losers who have never and could never accomplish anything.

White and the UFC started inviting influencers and content creators to replace the credentialed unbiased journalists you expect at pro sports events. They could make videos, promote the events, and they wouldn’t question the organization giving them good tickets to said events in fear of losing opportunities to create monetizable content about their lavish life.

What the UFC was doing was creating a culture of total control.

When the UFC was fighting for relevancy, a few other organizations were putting on some of the best fights you’ll ever see.

PRIDE was dominating in Japan and many fans thought their heavyweights and light heavyweights were the best in the sport. Names like Fedor Emelianenko, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Shogun Rua, and Wanderlei Silva were just some of the stars carrying their brand.

On the other end of the world and weight divisions, WEC was leading the charge. Demetrious Johnson, Dominick Cruz, Jose Aldo, and Anthony Pettis are only a few of the men who fought there and later became UFC champions.

Both of these organizations were purchase by the UFC in 2006 and 2007. Alongside them came World Fighting Alliance, International Fight League’s assets, and Strikeforce all were folded under the UFC’s parent company Zuffa.

Having so many great fighters under one roof makes for a convenient viewing experience but it leaves fighters without many options to fight elsewhere. That meant they had little leverage in contract negotiations. It was the UFC’s way or the highway and rhe coming years would make the UFC’s way that much harder.

For the majority of MMA’s existence UFC fighters earned extra cash by accepting uniform sponsors. Companies could strap a logo on fighters’ shorts in exchange for additional compensation. This made the athletes’ clothing look not uniform.

Brendan Schaub said,

After creating an organization for everyone to watch that allowed anyone to compete in to improve their life, the UFC bought competitors and removed their contracted athletes means of making additional money so they would be more desperate to fight. Dana Whit even spelled out his logic in a Stanford Business School lecture.

In 2016 the UFC sold for just north of $4 billion. That was the largest transaction in professional sports history. Since then there has been a gradual degradation in fight promotion.

Before 2016 the UFC was run by fanatics. A name you don’t hear often and a face you never see was largely responsible for the UFC we loved. Joe Silva. The tyrannical matchmaker’s story is emblematic of the UFC’s early days.

He had no experience

If you listen to Dana White explain his relationship with Donald Trump he’ll call him a friend. A once necessary ally that saved his company and the sport in America.

That’s not exactly the whole story.

It’s true that Trump hosted three UFC events between 2000 and 2001 at his Taj Mahal Casino. The first of those events, UFC 30, was the first event that White and the Fertitta brothers promoted after buying the company. But the UFC also hosted 23 events between 2000-2004 and Trump even tried to compete with the UFC after the success of The Ultimate Fighter reality show.

Trump, Michael Cohen, and Tom Atencio started a promotion called Affliction in 2008. They signed former UFC champions Tim Sylvia, Josh Barnett, Andrei Arlovski, and Vitor Belfort, plus future champ Robbie Lawler. It was a promotion centered around the all-time great Fedor Emelianenko. The fighter who former UFC Heavyweight and Light Heavyweight Champion Randy Couture tried to exit the UFC in hopes of fighting.

Trump bragged about how Affliction was going to take over MMA, “All the fighters want to be with us, and I think it probably will take over.”

It didn’t.

Before Affliction put on their third event, Josh Barnett tested positive for a banned substance. He was unable to headline the card against Fedor and Trump’s attempt at promoting MMA was dead and gone much to the delight of White.

Trump mostly stayed out of MMA until he decided to run for President. Then he began sitting cage-side at UFC events to appeal to more young men that felt disenfranchised by previous political administrations.

Trump got elected in 2016 and 2024 but that wasn’t the end of the UFC’s utility for him. He appeared cage side at UFC 264 in July, several months after January 6th’s attack on the capitol. He was met with boos and cheers but it was clear he had people in his corner. White would even introduce Trump at 2024’s Republican National Convention.

Like all good relationships, this one has plenty of ongoing reciprocity.

Paramount+ is the UFC’s current streaming partner in the USA and Canada. 7 years of broadcasting cost them $7.7 billion dollars. Paramount was only able to afford that price after Trump’s FCC approved their merger with Skydance 18 days before the transaction. Trump has since taken additional interest in the success of the UFC by purchasing stock options in the UFC’s parent company ahead of the event on his birthday. An event that might not even be legal.

A recent lawsuit filed against UFC Freedom 250 argues that the UFC and its partners are being allowed to profit from access to some of the nation's federal sites which means it does not qualify for special authorization under temporary rules adopted for America's 250th anniversary celebrations.

You just can’t look at the UFC’s alliance with Trump objectively and think it will continue to be a net positive for the company. He literally has the lowest approval rating of any other president at this point in their term. He sucks and it sucks that the UFC is joined with him at the hip. With the event at the White House approaching, you do need to remember that mixed martial arts is bigger than this weekend.

In case it’s not obvious, I love mixed martial arts. Talking, training, and watching fighting has taken most of my time since I was a teenager. And because the UFC makes up the majority of MMA, I can’t help but have a special place in my heart for the company that has given me so much joy and helped define the activity that gave my life some direction.

When I was 17 I was briefly homeless. I like to say I was homeless-light. I hate the term “unhoused” but I have to acknowledge it perfectly explains what happened to me.

My father was unable to pay the mortgage of the home that I slept in. I watched police change the locks on our front door. I was forced to face up to his eviction notice and my housing was undone.

I was able to live at my best friend’s house. His dad had a spare bedroom and I had a way to pay for my own food so I wasn’t really in the way. I was as happy as a hermit crab finding a more spacious shell. But really my happiness had more to do with where I was when I wasn’t in my temporary home. My gym, Combat Fitness.

Combat Fitness still inhabits a warehouse in Concord, California. They had bags to hit, people to spar with, and real role models to learn from.

I spent hours of my days there. I found passion in a physical struggle. It lit a fire in me and told me I don’t have accept whatever position I find myself in, in and out of a ring. And I can’t help but see a version of my experience in people across the world.

Martial arts can satisfy when I see as a necessary experience. A type of initiation ritual into the beginning of adulthood. The accepting of responsibility for your development.

If you want to get better you have to train. You have to take it on the chin and come back to get better. You have to care enough to actually work for something.

Dojos, gyms, and rings around the world can create places where particularly at risk youth can mature. With professional combat sports, these people can find means of turning their skills into money. They can sell their skills to gyms, promoters, and people wanting to learn from and be entertained by them.

The writer Gerald Early wrote,

Man if Early could see the UFC.

Political corruption. Market consolidation. Tailored suits taking out the fans and craftsman that made the company and its product special. They really have take the psychotic vision and ran with it.

But I am here to say that much like America is bigger than Donald Trump, combat sports exist outside of the UFC.

The three highest attended events to this day are PRIDE Shockwave, OKTAGON 62, and KSW 39. All three of those events happened in different years and countries. The market for mixed martial arts exists and it is ready for more players.

We have new people putting new money into MMA, exquisite pageantry from promotions like Rizin, European promotions like Oktagon and KSW are selling out stadiums, and the most watched MMA fight in American history was not promoted by the UFC. I mean, even the PFL is in the middle of contract negotiations for a new streaming partner and they’re coming to my town soon so I will be in attendance.

I’m not self-righteous enough to pretend that fighting professionally or even training for fun is solely some virtuous pursuit. It’s bloody. It can be gross. And, as I hope you can see from above, many of the people in it are ripe for exploitation.

But combat sports and martial arts have, and will continue to, benefit countless disenfranchised people so I’m not going to let one guy’s egomaniacal birthday party ruin my sport. And I’m definitely not ready to secede from what I love.

The man that founded the martial art that the Gracies adapted, rebranded, and used to win UFC 1 described the two principles of his system as,

Highest efficient use of energy for mutual aid. That’s what martial arts, combat sports, and MMA are about at their core. I will die on that hill whether it’s during this administration or next.

Clover rode a rising trend of health-conscious dining into a rapid expansion, opening dozens of brick-and-mortar stores throughout the region. But as interest in meat alternatives faded in recent years, the company was unable to maintain its lofty vision.

On Tuesday, Clover’s executives it would close its 12 remaining quick-serve restaurants and kiosks for good at the end of business on Thursday after more than 17 years.

Changing consumer tastes were only one factor in the collapse. Muir and the company’s current management team blamed Clover’s demise on a restaurant economy that has been reshaped by remote work, inflationary prices, and rising operating costs that have affected all of Boston.

But Clover’s demise, investors say, was foreshadowed for years. Documents show a visionary company squeezed by mounting financial pressures as management focused on growth.

Ingredient costs, the company said in a newsletter to customers on Tuesday night, are 30 to 50 percent more now than just two years ago.

“Our local farms are raising their prices,” Clover chief executive Julia Wrin Piper, who has led a turnaround she said has represented a “steady march toward sustainable profitability.” “We simply can’t keep up with inflationary pressures.”

About 170 people will lose their jobs, and leave a hole in the city’s restaurant scene for diners.

“It really seemed like the future of food,” said Kelly Andreoni, a longtime vegetarian and Clover fan starting in its early days. She recently returned and found the experience disappointing. The restaurant was dirty, she said, and quality wasn’t there. “We knew it wouldn’t be long before they closed.”

Justin Alpert, a Boston University professor and restaurant architect, said he regularly went to Clover for falafel. When other fast casual chains popped up that served similar food, ingredients weren’t from local farms, he said.

“Unfortunately, sustainable practices and use of quality products come at a literal cost,” said Alpert. “They chose to go down with that ship in lieu of selling out.”

Muir exited as CEO in late 2023. (He said he resigned; Piper said he was terminated.) A month later, the company filed for bankruptcy protection — emerging the following year with what it described as a clean slate and a desire to open even more stores.

Kitchen staff were hard at work at a Massachusetts Avenue Clover location in 2015. Matthew J. Lee

Documents filed in bankruptcy court showed Clover had about $792,000 in listed assets and about $3.85 million in liabilities. It didn’t own any of its restaurants’ real estate, and a meaningful chunk of what the company still owned — roughly $253,000 at the time — was in food and supplies.

The startup could no longer pay the leases on its new commissary in Hyde Park and several of its restaurants. It had raised $1.8 million earlier in 2023, cut payroll by 43 percent, and unsuccessfully tried to renegotiate its leases. Management also failed to secure a second round of funding that August.

Ron Shaich, the founder of Panera Bread and a Brookline native, was an early investor in Clover. When reached by text, Shaich was blunt about its demise: “I walked away many years ago from the investment when I lost faith in management and the board’s capacities, focus and decision making.”

“The results speak for themselves,” said Shaich, now a major investor whose portfolio has included fast-growing chains such as Cava and Tatte Bakery & Café.

John Pepper, who founded local fast-casual chain Boloco in 1997 and was also an early Clover investor, said he foresaw Clover’s end when he sold his shares at a 50 percent discount at a loss in 2019.

“Am I surprised? No. The structural issues were visible years ago,” said Pepper, who pointed to real estate and overhead costs as some of Clover’s biggest problems. It leased expensive storefronts that needed high volumes to work. That’s “fine when you’re growing, and have exceptionally strong-stomached backers — such as McDonalds for Chipotle — but brutal when you’re don’t have those things and things don’t go exactly according to plan."

Clover’s overhead, he said, was carrying a much bigger company than the one that actually existed.

“Once growth stalled, the math stopped working and the cuts came too slowly,” said Pepper.

Coming out of the pandemic, workers were slow to return to the office, which led to a decline in corporate catering and lunch sales. At the same time, “the cost of labor literally doubled, the cost of utilities doubled, real estate taxes in the city doubled, rents continued to escalate every year,” said Muir. “Restaurateurs find themselves with many more expenses than they ever had but less sales than they ever had.”

“It’s a difficult equation to make it all work,” he added.

Clover’s management had hoped to find a buyer that could keep some or all of the business going. Some of those conversations remain ongoing with what Muir described as a mix of potential buyers. He and Piper declined to name any of the parties.

“We are actively having these conversations that we have hope around ... especially now with the news out,” said Piper, who said she was brought in to replace Muir in 2023 because the company was facing imminent liquidation. “The company has survived a lot of hard periods, one of them we’re grappling with now.”

Piper said she informed Clover’s board, which Muir sits on, last week that “in order to operate responsibly, we had to wind-down operations.”

Muir said it was not until this week that he learned the details of when stores would actually shut down permanently.

“I didn’t know I couldn’t eat at a Clover restaurant this coming weekend until just a few days ago,” Muir.

The Clover restaurant in Harvard Square in 2011.Essdras M Suarez/Globe Staff

Megan Pileggi, Clover’s former director of human resources and development, said she was attracted to the company’s mission of sourcing from little-known local farmers.

“I really believed in it,” said Pileggi. “We all felt like we were part of something much bigger than ourselves.”

But she also saw the problems before leaving in 2019 after nearly 10 years: “We were really trying to ramp things up to go into a new markets, and like, that was an investment that wasn’t right for us.”

In August 2023, Clover closed its Copley Square. At the time, management said it was Clover’s poorest-performing location, losing $350,000 annually over the past few years. Its rent was also $350,000 a year.

Clover’s shuttering also comes as consumers move away from plant-based foods and artificial meats to focus on real meats and dairy.

Matthew Britt, a culinary professor at Johnson & Wales University, compared the restaurant industry to a roller coaster. “Things come up and down. The same goes for plant-based dining.”

“It makes you wonder if Clover got too big,” added Britt.

Muir said in 2014 that he expected Clover to one day be “more profitable than Chipotle and bigger than McDonald’s.”

On Tuesday, Muir didn’t backpedal.

“That was the ambition for the project that Clover was. That was what the world needed,” said Muir, now the CEO of El Nacho, a tortilla chip manufacturer in Waltham. “I wish we had more success getting to that.”

Alexa Gagosz can be reached at alexa.gagosz@globe.com. Follow her @alexagagosz and on Instagram @AlexaGagosz.