Campaign finance disclosures from the FEC and four state databases now provide the clearest picture yet of how AI tools are embedding themselves in American political operations. At least $17 million in disclosed spending on AI technology vendors has flowed across 523 federal candidates and campaigns since 2020, with state-level spending exploding tenfold between 2024 and 2026. The data comes from a tracking project by the authors of Rewiring Democracy, published by MIT Press. The general-purpose AI vendors — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — show modest but politically sorted spending. About 80 federal campaigns have reported roughly $50,000 to OpenAI since 2024, skewing slightly Republican, with the RNC as the largest buyer at nearly $10,000. Anthropic has surged from essentially zero to 65 reported users in 2026, with a nearly two-to-one Democrat-to-Republican ratio. Senator Tom Cotton is the largest individual Anthropic spender at over $4,000. xAI's Grok draws almost exclusively from the right, with just seven federal users and about $5,000 total, the majority from RFK Jr.'s 2024 presidential campaign. Only about 12% of campaigns using either ChatGPT or Claude reported spending on both. The real money flows to purpose-built political AI vendors. AmplifAI, an automated text-messaging platform, absorbed $4.7 million in the 2022 cycle alone from Democratic campaigns including those of Mark Kelly, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Adam Schiff. Now owned by troubled media conglomerate Triller, its spending has tapered. Its successor on the Democratic side is Daisychain, which has grown from $50,000 in reported spend in 2024 to about $300,000 in 2026, with more than half from Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's Senate campaign. On the Republican side, Campaign Nucleus — the AI voter engagement tool associated with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale — has attracted six-figure spending from the RNC and Trump-aligned PACs, plus five-figure investments from Mike Johnson and Kari Lake. It is displacing the legacy vendor Prompt.io, whose spending has declined from over $500,000 in 2022 to about $375,000 in 2026, though an Uber-sponsored PAC called A More Affordable California has single-handedly spent over $1 million on Prompt.io in 2026. Deepfake-adjacent tools barely register in disclosures. Just six federal campaigns reported spending on ElevenLabs (about $1,400 total) and five on Midjourney (about $1,600). Combined state-level spending on both was under $100. Yet the Wesleyan Media Project found at least 164 political ads this cycle containing AI-generated media, backed by at least $80 million in ad spending — illustrating the massive gap between what campaigns disclose directly and what actually gets spent through consultants, media firms, and independent committees. The disclosure gap is the structural story. Candidates and committees must file itemized expenditures with the FEC; the consultants, media buyers, and PACs they hire largely do not. A September 2025 Pew survey found more than 70% of Americans would think less of a candidate who used AI to write a speech. That public hostility creates a powerful incentive to route AI spending through intermediaries who face no disclosure requirements, ensuring the disclosed $17 million dramatically understates actual AI adoption in campaigns. Four states — California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington — provide additional granularity going back to 2022, showing at least $92,000 in state-level spending across 108 candidates and committees. DonorAtlas, an AI-powered donor prospect research tool, stands out at the state level, buoyed by nearly $4,000 from the California Democratic Party. The pattern is clear: AI is already standard campaign infrastructure, but the reporting architecture was not built to capture how it is actually deployed.
