New campaign finance disclosure data is shining a bright light on how United States political campaigns are integrating artificial intelligence into their operations, revealing not only which tools they are adopting but precisely how much money they are channeling into the burgeoning tech sector.
An analysis of spending by candidates, political parties, and committees reveals that artificial intelligence is fast becoming an essential, embedded tool of modern politics. Yet, despite the billions of impressions generated by campaign messaging, the candidates themselves often remain tight-lipped about how heavily they rely on these systems behind closed doors. It is a sensitive issue that researchers have been tracking closely, particularly since examining how artificial intelligence is beginning to fundamentally influence the democratic process. Public skepticism remains a powerful deterrent; a September 2025 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that more than 70 percent of Americans would think less of a political candidate if they discovered that artificial intelligence had been used to help draft a speech.
Despite this apprehension, itemized expenditure disclosure data from the US Federal Election Commission, spanning records dating back to 2020, reveals at least $17 million in disclosed spending on artificial intelligence technology vendors across 523 federal candidates and campaigns. A localized picture emerges when examining data from four individual states—California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington—which provides a granular view of state-level adoption dating back to 2022.
Beginning with the industry’s massive general-purpose platforms, at least 80 federal campaigns and committees have reported direct spending with OpenAI since 2024. While the aggregate financial footprint is modest—hovering around $50,000 in reported expenditures—the distribution tilts slightly more toward Republican accounts than Democratic ones. Notably, the Republican National Committee stands out as the largest overall buyer in this category, accounting for nearly $10,000 in reported expenses. Top individual users of OpenAI services include the campaign committees of Republican lawmakers Mike Lawler, John Kennedy, and Bill Cassidy, alongside prominent California Democrats Ro Khanna and Ted Lieu.
A review of these disclosures shows that the vast majority of these line items are listed as standard office expenses, staff subscriptions to ChatGPT for everyday productivity, or general research tools, rather than custom political services. This distinction is crucial, as the company’s internal corporate policies formally prohibit certain specific political applications of their consumer-facing ChatGPT tools, forcing campaigns to navigate complex terms of service while equipping their staff with cutting-edge software.
OpenAI’s primary competitor, Anthropic, has rapidly achieved a comparable level of market penetration among political organizations, though with a markedly different partisan split. At least 65 candidates or political committees reported paying the maker of the Claude AI model in 2026, marking a dramatic surge from essentially zero recorded expenditures in previous election cycles. Among these users, spending leans roughly two-to-one in favor of Democrats over Republicans.
However, the single largest individual user of Anthropic’s software is the campaign of Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, who reported more than $4,000 in software expenditures in his June filing alone. Other notable users include Montana independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar, Jason Knapp—who mounted a Democratic House primary run in Virginia—and Alaska Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola.
A striking pattern within the federal data is that political campaigns tend to choose a side between the two major language models, utilizing either Claude or ChatGPT, but rarely both. Only about 12 percent of campaigns or committees that reported expenditures on either general-purpose tool listed payments to both vendors. Analysts suggest that Anthropic’s distinct Democratic lean may be reflective of the company’s perceived liberal orientation and its high-profile policy clashes with the federal administration.
In contrast, Elon Musk’s xAI venture explicitly caters to conservative interests, and its relatively meager political footprint is reflected almost entirely on the political right. Just seven federal candidates and two state-level committees have reported payments to xAI, totaling roughly $5,000. The majority of that spending originated from the 2024 presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., though the roster also includes prominent Republican figures such as Dave McCormick and Thomas Massie.
While general-purpose chatbots capture headlines, significantly larger sums of money are flowing to specialized vendors that build artificial intelligence applications specifically tailored for political campaigns. For several election cycles, AmplifAI dominated this space by providing automated text messaging systems that essentially function as sophisticated, modern iterations of traditional robocalling technology. During the 2022 election cycle alone, the platform soaked up $4.7 million in campaign spending, heavily leveraged by high-profile Democratic candidates including Mark Kelly, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Adam Schiff. Spending on AmplifAI, which is now owned by the media conglomerate Triller, appears to have tapered off in the years following that peak.
To fill that vacuum, a new rising Democratic solution for artificial intelligence-powered text messaging has emerged in Daisychain. That platform has garnered approximately $300,000 in reported candidate spending during the 2026 election cycle, a significant leap from the roughly $50,000 reported in 2024. More than half of this year’s financial backing has come directly from the Michigan Senate campaign of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
On the Republican side, the closest operational equivalent has been Campaign Nucleus, a platform associated with former Donald Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. This artificial intelligence-powered voter engagement tool has attracted six-figure investments from the Republican National Committee, multiple political action committees aligned with Donald Trump, and five-figure investments from congressional leaders like Mike Johnson and candidates like Kari Lake.
Campaign Nucleus appears to be steadily displacing legacy Republican-serving texting vendors such as Prompt.io, which has retained about $375,000 in 2026 spending to date—down significantly from more than $500,000 in the 2022 cycle. Despite this contraction, Prompt.io remains active in specific strongholds. For instance, the "A More Affordable California" political action committee, sponsored by Uber, single-handedly poured more than $1 million into Prompt.io during the 2026 cycle. Republican Massachusetts gubernatorial nominee Michael Minogue has also been a recurring customer, alongside failed California gubernatorial candidate Ché Ahn and the Republican-aligned super PAC Neighbors for a Better Colorado.
At the State Level
At the state level, artificial intelligence spending remains smaller in absolute terms but is expanding at a remarkable pace. Across the four states examined in the research, analysts identified a total of at least $92,000 in spending confidently attributable to modern generative artificial intelligence vendors since 2022. This capital is distributed across at least 108 individual candidates and political committees, exhibiting explosive growth with roughly ten times the amount of state-level artificial intelligence spending reported in 2026 compared to the entirety of 2024.
Much of this localized spending mirrors federal patterns. Daisychain commands the highest overall spend at the state level, while OpenAI and Claude maintain their dominant positions among general-purpose artificial intelligence vendors. Additionally, DonorAtlas—an artificial intelligence-powered prospect research tool designed for fundraising—stands out prominently in state disclosures, trailing only Daisychain and OpenAI. Its adoption has been heavily buoyed by nearly $4,000 in expenditures from the California Democratic Party.
Even though it has dominated broader media conversations regarding the election, surprisingly few candidates are formally reporting direct spending on tools specifically engineered to create synthetic audio and video, commonly known as deepfakes. Researchers found only six federal candidates or committees reporting expenditures on the popular artificial intelligence audio generation tool ElevenLabs, with total spending resting at approximately $1,400, led primarily by independent congressional candidate Samir Witta in Colorado’s sixth district. Similarly, the artificial intelligence image generation service Midjourney recorded just five federal campaign users spending roughly $1,600, led by Sholdon Daniels, the Republican primary runner-up in Texas’s 30th district. Combined, those two specialized creative firms accounted for less than $100 in reported spending across all four examined states.
However, a stark disconnect exists between official candidate disclosures and the wider media landscape. Recent data compiled by the Wesleyan Media Project shows that at least 164 political advertisements in the current cycle have incorporated artificial intelligence-generated media, backed by at least $80 million in total advertising expenditures.
This massive discrepancy illustrates that candidate and committee disclosure reports represent merely the tip of the iceberg. Official filings do not cover the extensive spending on artificial intelligence deployed by political consultants, media firms, public relations agencies, and other specialized vendors hired directly by campaigns. Nor do they capture the massive outlays of super PACs and independent expenditure committees that raise and spend vast sums to boost candidates from the shadows. Because these external entities are not subject to the same granular expenditure reporting requirements, they constitute the hidden engine room where the vast majority of campaign artificial intelligence deployment is likely taking place.
With a substantial fraction of all campaign expenditures traditionally concentrated in the tense, final weeks leading up to the November elections, the full extent of how political operations will leverage artificial intelligence—and what ultimate impact its use will have on the decisions made by voters—remines a story still unfolding.
Cyber Security & Cryptography
Cyber Security & Cryptography
Cyber Security & Cryptography
