New campaign finance disclosure data shines a light on which US political campaigns are using AI tools and how much they are spending on them. Candidates’, parties’, and committees’ spending reveals that AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics. The candidates themselves are quiet about how they are using the technology in their own campaigns.
It’s a sensitive issue that we have been tracking closely since we started writing our book, Rewiring Democracy, which examined how AI is beginning to influence politics. A September 2025 Pew survey of Americans found that more than 70% would think less of a candidate if they used AI to help write a speech. Itemized expenditure disclosure data from the US Federal Election Commission, dating back to 2020, reveals at least $17m in disclosed spending on AI technology vendors across 523 federal candidates and campaigns.
Data from four states, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington, provides a more localized picture going back to 2022. Beginning with the AI behemoths, at least 80 federal campaigns and committees have reported spending with OpenAI since 2024. The total spending is not huge: only about $50,000 reported, skewing slightly more Republican than Democratic.
The Republican National Committee is the largest overall buyer, with nearly $10,000 in reported expenses. Top individual users include the campaigns of Republicans Mike Lawler, John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, as well as California Democrats Ro Khanna and Ted Lieu. Most of these expenses are listed as office expenses, subscriptions to ChatGPT for staff, or research tools, rather than as specific political services.
The company’s policies prohibit some political uses of their ChatGPT tool. OpenAI’s biggest competitor, Anthropic, has rapidly built a similar level of usage, but with a different split. At least 65 candidates or committees now report paying the Claude maker in 2026, up from essentially zero in previous years, with a nearly two-to-one Democrat-to-Republican ratio.
However, the largest individual user is the campaign of Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, who reported more than $4,000 in spend on Anthropic software in his June filing. Other major users are Montana Independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar and Jason Knapp, who lost a Democratic House primary in Virginia, and Democratic Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola. Candidates use either Claude or ChatGPT, rarely both, according to the disclosures.
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