Kenneth Glad
Elections bring a tidal wave of texts and ads to our screens. The stakes are huge. Politicians spend billions to win our attention, but rarely explain how they build those daily blasts. Now, a look at their financial records shows a quiet shift is taking place behind closed doors.
Voters dislike computers running elections. A September 2025 Pew survey found that more than 70 percent of Americans would judge a candidate harshly for letting artificial intelligence write a speech, The Guardian reported.
Because of this stigma, politicians keep quiet about their digital tools. But they cannot hide their receipts.
Since 2020, more than 523 federal campaigns have funneled at least $17 million into artificial intelligence, according to Federal Election Commission data analyzed by the British newspaper. State spending is also growing fast.
Choosing their bots
When campaigns need basic artificial intelligence, they split along party lines. More than 80 federal groups have purchased OpenAI services since 2024 to help run their operations, The Guardian reports.
The Republican National Committee ranks as the top spender with almost $10,000 in charges. Meanwhile, Anthropic and its Claude software attract a heavy Democratic customer base, though Republican Senator Tom Cotton remains its biggest individual buyer.
Elon Musk created his xAI platform to attract conservatives. The paper points out that its political footprint remains small and almost exclusively right-wing.
Flooding your phone
General chatbots only make up a fraction of the budget. The real money goes to specialized platforms that automate text messages and voter outreach on a massive scale.
Democrats are pouring cash into a new system called Daisychain for the 2026 cycle. Republicans take a different path. They rely on Campaign Nucleus, a powerful tool tied to former Donald Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale.
These systems replace older automated calling technology. They allow campaigns to target voters with lightning speed.
The missing millions
Public filings reveal remarkably few direct payments for software that produces fake audio or video. Payments to image generators like Midjourney barely register on the books.
That does not mean the technology is sitting idle.
The Wesleyan Media Project discovered that $80 million in recent ad buys paid for at least 164 commercials featuring synthetic media. Consultants do the heavy lifting here.
The Guardian explains that campaigns hire outside media firms who do not have to disclose their exact software subscriptions. That loophole keeps the true scale of political AI safely hidden from the public.
Sources: The Guardian, Pew Research Center, Federal Election Commission, Wesleyan Media Project
