Recent campaign finance disclosure data from the US Federal Election Commission provides insight into how American political campaigns are adopting artificial intelligence tools and the scale of their investments. The data, which covers federal candidates and campaigns dating back to 2020, shows at least $17 million in reported spending on AI technology vendors across 523 federal candidates and campaigns. State-level disclosures from California, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington reveal an additional pattern of spending beginning in 2022.
General-purpose AI chatbot platforms account for a significant portion of campaign adoption. At least 80 federal campaigns and committees have reported spending with OpenAI since 2024, totaling approximately $50,000, with slightly more Republican than Democratic usage. The Republican National Committee represents the largest individual purchaser of OpenAI services. Anthropic’s Claude tool has gained rapid traction, with at least 65 candidates or committees reporting payments in 2026, representing a jump from essentially no usage in previous years. Usage of Claude skews more heavily Democratic, while Elon Musk’s xAI sees adoption primarily from Republican candidates and committees, with only about $5,000 in reported spending.
Specialized political campaign AI applications command substantially larger spending totals. AmplifAI, which provides automated text messaging capabilities, accounted for $4.7 million in spending during the 2022 cycle alone, though spending has declined since then. Daisychain, a Democratic-aligned text messaging platform, has grown to approximately $300,000 in reported spending during 2026. On the Republican side, Campaign Nucleus, associated with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, has attracted six-figure spending from the Republican National Committee and various aligned political action committees.
At the state level across the four studied states, campaigns reported at least $92,000 in spending on modern generative AI vendors since 2022, distributed across at least 108 candidates and committees. State-level spending has grown substantially, with 2026 reporting approximately ten times the amount of AI spending seen in 2024. Despite widespread media attention to synthetic media capabilities, relatively few campaigns have reported spending on deepfake audio or video generation tools, with only six federal campaigns reporting spending on audio generation technology and five reporting spending on AI image generation services.
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