Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
US campaigns have disclosed at least $17m in AI spending that candidates rarely discuss
FEC filings show 523 federal candidates and campaigns disclosed at least $17m on AI vendors since 2020, though candidates rarely talk about it. Chatbot subscriptions are a small office cost in those records, while the bigger sums buy automated texting from vendors split by party.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- At least 65 candidates or committees report paying Anthropic in 2026, up from essentially zero, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans nearly two to one.
- AmplifAI, an automated texting vendor used heavily by Democrats, took $4.7m of campaign spending in the 2022 cycle alone, though spending on it appears to have tapered since.
- Daisychain, a Democratic AI texting tool, has about $300,000 in reported 2026 candidate spending, up from about $50,000 in 2024.
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Why it matters
- constraint Filing chatbot seats as office costs lets disclosure capture the purchase but not the use, so voters cannot see whether AI helped write the speeches a Pew majority says it would penalise.
- decision Picking a chatbot or texting vendor for 2026 now also means joining a partisan customer base, since few campaigns pay both labs and the texting tools have divided by party.
- exposure More than half of Daisychain's 2026 spending comes from one Michigan Senate campaign. Most of the leading Democratic texting option's reported 2026 spending rests on a single race.
Divided evenly, the $17m comes to roughly $32,500 per federal campaign over six years of filings [1][1]. The average hides a skew. OpenAI's total works out to about $625 per paying campaign or committee since 2024 [2]. A sum that size buys a few staff seats, and the filings mostly describe it that way: office expenses, ChatGPT subscriptions for staff and research tools, not specific political services [6].
The authors of Rewiring Democracy, who analysed the filings for the Guardian, wrote that "AI is fast becoming an essential tool of politics" [4]. That summary leaves out where the money sits. OpenAI's total equals about 0.3% of the federal figure [4]. AmplifAI's texting service, which the authors describe as "essentially a new iteration on robocalling technology", took in a single 2022 cycle a sum equal to about 28% of the $17m [13][3]. The authors report that more dollars go to vendors built for political applications than to the large labs [12].
Candidates say little about their own use of the technology, according to the authors [2]. A September 2025 Pew survey found that more than 70% of Americans would think less of a candidate who used AI to help write a speech [3]. The authors set those two facts side by side, and the filings do not show that one causes the other. They support a narrower finding. A ChatGPT seat filed as an office expense [6] records a purchase and leaves out the purpose. OpenAI's policies also prohibit some political uses of the tool [7], so the office label may simply describe what the product is permitted to do.
Only about 12% of campaigns or committees using ChatGPT or Claude reported paying both vendors [10]. The sums themselves are small: $17m across six years and 523 campaigns, as the per-campaign average shows [1]. How buyers sort by party is the more lasting signal. Anthropic's customers lean Democratic [8]. Its largest single user, though, is Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, with more than $4,000 in his June filing [9]. xAI has seven federal and two state-level paying filers and about $5,000 in total, most of it from RFK Jr's 2024 presidential campaign [11].
Texting has split the same way. Daisychain, which the authors call the rising Democratic option, has grown sixfold since 2024 [5]. On the Republican side, Campaign Nucleus, associated with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, has drawn six-figure sums from the Republican National Committee and Trump-aligned PACs [15]. It is displacing Prompt.io, which has about $375,000 in 2026 spending to date [15].
A campaign that commits to one lab or one texting platform for 2026 joins a customer base that seldom overlaps with the other party's [10][15]. Dominance does not carry over automatically: spending on AmplifAI, now owned by Triller, appears to have tapered since its 2022 peak [13]. The evidence for these patterns comes from federal filings plus four states, California, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington, whose data starts in 2022 [16].
What to watch
- Later 2026 FEC filings showing whether Anthropic's growth continues and whether more campaigns start paying both OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Any FEC or state move to require campaigns to state the purpose of AI purchases instead of filing them as office expenses.
- Whether Campaign Nucleus keeps taking Republican texting spend from Prompt.io through the rest of the 2026 cycle.