Campaign disclosures show $17 million in federal AI spending

Vendor choice splits along party lines in federal AI filings

At least 80 federal campaigns and committees have reported spending with OpenAI since 2024. The total dollar figure is modest — only about $50,000 — and skews slightly more Republican than Democratic, according to the Sanders and Schneier analysis. The Republican National Committee is the largest single buyer, with nearly $10,000 in reported expenses. Top individual OpenAI users include the campaigns of Republicans Mike Lawler, John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, alongside California Democrats Ro Khanna and Ted Lieu. Most of these expenses are categorized as office expenses or staff subscriptions to ChatGPT rather than as political services, and OpenAI’s policies prohibit some political uses of the ChatGPT tool.

Anthropic, maker of Claude, has reached a similar scale of adoption but with a sharply different partisan split. At least 65 candidates or committees report paying Anthropic in 2026, up from essentially zero in previous years, with a nearly two-to-one Democrat-to-Republican ratio. The largest individual user is the campaign of Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who reported more than $4,000 in Anthropic software spending in his June filing. Other major users include Montana Independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar, Jason Knapp, who lost a Democratic House primary in Virginia, and Democratic Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola. The analysis notes that candidates tend to use either Claude or ChatGPT, rarely both — only about 12% of campaigns and committees using either tool reported expenditures to both vendors. The authors suggest the Democratic lean of Anthropic usage may reflect the company’s perceived political orientation and clashes with the Trump administration.

In contrast, Elon Musk’s xAI caters to Republican interests and accordingly sees meager usage from that side of the aisle. Just seven federal and two state-level candidates or committees have reported paying xAI, totaling about $5,000, the majority spent by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign. Other reported xAI users include Republicans Dave McCormick and Thomas Massie.

The larger sums in disclosed spending flow to vendors specializing in political campaign applications. For years, AmplifAI — which provides automated text messaging, an evolution of robocalling technology — was a dominant target, absorbing $4.7 million in campaign spending in the 2022 cycle alone. It was used heavily by Democratic candidates including Mark Kelly, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff. Now owned by media conglomerate Triller, AmplifAI spending appears to have tapered in subsequent cycles.

The rising Democratic solution for AI-powered text messaging is Daisychain, which has garnered about $300,000 in reported candidate spending in the 2026 cycle, up from roughly $50,000 in 2024. More than half of this year’s spending comes from the Senate campaign of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

The closest Republican equivalent has been Campaign Nucleus, an AI-powered voter engagement tool associated with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. It has attracted six-figure spending from the Republican National Committee, multiple PACs aligned with Donald Trump, and five-figure investments from Speaker Mike Johnson and Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake. Campaign Nucleus appears to be displacing the legacy Republican-serving texting vendor Prompt.io, which has retained about $375,000 in 2026 spending to date, down from more than $500,000 in the 2022 cycle. Prompt.io continues to draw notable users: the A More Affordable California PAC, sponsored by Uber, has spent more than $1 million with Prompt.io in 2026. Other recurring Prompt.io customers include Republican Massachusetts gubernatorial nominee Michael Minogue, failed Republican California gubernatorial candidate Ché Ahn, and the Republican-aligned Super PAC Neighbors for a Better Colorado.

State-level AI spending is smaller but growing rapidly. Across California, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington, Sanders and Schneier found at least $92,000 in spending attributable to modern generative AI vendors since 2022, spread across at least 108 candidates and committees. The growth has been explosive: about ten times as much state-level AI spending has been reported in 2026 as in all of 2024. Daisychain again leads in overall state spend, with OpenAI and Claude dominant among general-purpose vendors, and DonorAtlas — an AI-powered prospect research tool — sitting behind only Daisychain and OpenAI in state-level use, buoyed by nearly $4,000 in spending from the California Democratic Party.

Despite the intense media attention to synthetic media, few campaigns report spending on AI tools designed specifically to create deepfake audio and video. Just six federal candidates or committees reported spending with the audio generator ElevenLabs, totaling about $1,400, led by independent candidate Samir Witta in Colorado’s sixth congressional district. Five federal campaign or committee users reported about $1,600 with the image generator Midjourney, led by Sholdon Daniels, the Republican primary runner-up in Texas’s 30th district. The two firms together had less than $100 in reported spending across the four states examined.

The disclosures capture only a fraction of campaign AI use. Recent data from the Wesleyan Media Project shows that at least 164 political ads in this cycle have included AI-generated media, supported by at least $80 million in ad spending — far more than the direct vendor payments reported to the FEC would suggest. As Sanders and Schneier note, candidate and committee disclosure reports do not cover spending on AI by political consultants, media firms and other vendors hired by campaigns, nor by PACs and independent committees raising and spending money to boost candidates. Those entities are not required to file detailed expenditure reports and are very likely where the bulk of campaign AI activity occurs.

Since a large share of spending in the campaign cycle happens in the final weeks before November, the authors write, much remains to be seen about how campaigns will ultimately use AI and what impact that use will have on voters.