FEC Filings Reveal Quiet AI Arms Race in US Campaigns

Two Machines Racing Toward November

Two teams, two toolkits, one calendar. As the 2026 midterms — the US elections held halfway through a president’s four-year term — approach, Democratic and Republican campaigns are assembling different machines out of different software, and the public ledger of what they buy shows which team is betting on which vendor. The scoreboard is the US Federal Election Commission, the US agency that collects and publishes campaign finance reports. Read together going back to 2020, those itemized expenditure disclosures — payments listed separately in filings, with vendor names and amounts — reveal at least $17m in disclosed spending on AI technology vendors across 523 federal candidates and campaigns. [1] It captures the purchases that were written down and reported by the entities required to report them, and it says nothing about payments that fell below the itemization bar — the spending level above which a payment must be listed separately — or about money routed through intermediaries that never file itemized expenditure reports at all. The candidates themselves are mostly quiet about how the technology is used inside their own operations. 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. [1].

What that window shows is a technology being absorbed into political work faster than either the campaigns or the public are willing to discuss. The silence and the spending are growing in the same direction, at the same time, from the same filings.

At least 80 federal campaigns and committees — campaign finance entities registered with the FEC, not legislative committees — have reported spending with OpenAI since 2024. [1] The Republican National Committee is the largest overall buyer, with nearly $10,000 in reported expenses. Among individual users, the top names include the campaigns of Republicans Mike Lawler, John Kennedy and Bill Cassidy, alongside the California Democrats Ro Khanna and Ted Lieu. Most of these expenses are listed as office expenses, as subscriptions to ChatGPT for staff, or as research tools, rather than as payments for a specific political service.

OpenAI’s biggest competitor has reached a comparable level of usage, but with a different partisan shape. At least 65 candidates or committees now report paying Anthropic, the maker of Claude, in 2026, up from essentially zero in previous years, with a nearly two-to-one Democrat-to-Republican ratio. The largest individual user sits against that grain: the campaign of Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, reported more than $4,000 in spending on Anthropic software in his June filing. Other major users include the Montana independent Senate candidate Seth Bodnar (a candidate running without a party label), Jason Knapp, who lost a Democratic House primary in Virginia (the internal party election that decides who becomes the party’s candidate), and the Democratic Alaska Senate candidate Mary Peltola. Campaigns rarely spread their bets — only about 12% of the campaigns or committees using either tool reported expenditures to both vendors, so most pick one assistant and stay with it.

Elon Musk’s xAI caters to Republican interests, and its usage follows that logic almost completely. Just seven federal and two state-level candidates or committees have reported paying xAI, for a total of about $5,000. The majority of that money was spent by the presidential campaign of RFK Jr in 2024. The remainder includes Republicans Dave McCormick and Thomas Massie. Set against the roughly $50,000 in total reported spending with OpenAI, the amounts are small.

What the Disclosure Forms Leave Out

The federal filings — the periodic reports campaigns must submit about money raised and spent — are only half a map. Data from four states — California, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington — provides a more localized picture going back to 2022, and it traces the same trend at a smaller scale. Across those four states, at least $92,000 in spending is confidently attributable to modern generative AI vendors — software that produces new text, images or sounds — since 2022, spread across at least 108 candidates and committees.

FEC Filings Reveal Quiet AI Arms Race in US Campaigns (Image 1) — AI-generated image

The growth is the clearest signal in the dataset. There has already been about 10 times the amount of state-level AI spending reported in 2026 as there was in all of 2024. The same names recur from the federal picture. Daisychain again has the highest overall spend, while OpenAI and Claude dominate among the general-purpose vendors. One niche tool stands out against that pattern: DonorAtlas, an AI-powered prospect research tool, sits behind only Daisychain and OpenAI in these states, lifted by nearly $4,000 in spending from the California Democratic party.

If media coverage were the measure, synthetic audio and video would dominate the ledger. They do not. Few candidates appear to be reporting spending on tools built specifically to generate deepfakes. Just six federal candidates or committees reported spending on the popular AI audio generator ElevenLabs, for a total of about $1,400, led by Samir Witta, an independent candidate for Colorado’s sixth congressional district. The AI image generator Midjourney has five reported federal campaign or committee users, for about $1,600, led by Sholdon Daniels, the Republican primary runner-up in Texas’s 30th district. Combined, those two firms drew less than $100 in reported spend across the four states — a rounding error next to the conversation they provoke.

That mismatch is where the ledger’s limits become visible. Counting only what candidates and committees itemize captures the visible tip of a much larger machine. The Wesleyan Media Project has found that at least 164 political ads in this cycle included AI-generated media, supported by at least $80m in ad spending. [1] The disclosure reports do not cover spending on AI by political consultants, media firms and other vendors hired by campaigns or by PACs, or by independent committees raising and spending money aimed at boosting candidates. Those entities are not required to file detailed expenditure reports, and they are very likely where the bulk of campaign AI usage is happening. So the $17m federal figure and the $92,000 state figure are floors, not totals. They measure the purchases that surfaced in a filing, not the work that was done. The numbers are not wrong — they were never designed to capture the whole. What remains to be corrected, and what may never be fully visible, is the spending that never crosses a disclosure threshold at all.

The Phone in the Voter’s Pocket

Before the chatbot, there was the text message, and the money followed the text first. For years, AmplifAI, which provides automated text messaging — essentially a new iteration on robocalling technology — was a dominant target of campaign spending, soaking up $4.7m in the 2022 cycle alone. It was used heavily by Democratic candidates including Mark Kelly, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff. Spending on AmplifAI, now owned by the troubled media conglomerate Triller, appears to have tapered off since 2022. The rising Democratic replacement for AI-powered texting is Daisychain, which has so far drawn about $300,000 in reported candidate spend in the 2026 cycle, up from only about $50,000 reported in 2024. More than half of this year’s spending comes from the Senate campaign of Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan — a concentration that shows how quickly one well-funded race can move a vendor’s total.

The Republican counterpart is Campaign Nucleus, the AI-powered voter engagement tool associated with former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. It has attracted six-figure spending from the Republican National Committee and from multiple PACs aligned with Donald Trump, along with five-figure investments from Mike Johnson, Kari Lake and other candidates. It is displacing the legacy Republican-serving texting vendor Prompt.io, which has retained about $375,000 in 2026 spending to date, down from more than $500,000 in the 2022 cycle. Prompt.io has not vanished from the field, though. The A More Affordable California PAC, sponsored by Uber, has single-handedly spent more than $1m on it in 2026. The Republican Massachusetts gubernatorial nominee Michael Minogue has been a recurring customer, as has the failed Republican California gubernatorial candidate Ché Ahn and the Republican-aligned Super PAC Neighbors for a Better Colorado. The turnover is not a clean replacement of one tool by another; it is a slow handoff, with legacy vendors holding on to the biggest single buyers even as the new ones take the smaller, faster-growing accounts.

The lock screen of a phone is where the change becomes visible. A message arrives, and it reads the way a person writes. The disclosure forms show which vendor was paid to help draft it — and they say almost nothing about the consultants and committees behind the ads that will actually run. Since a large fraction of all spending in the cycle will happen in the final weeks leading to November, much remains to be seen about how campaigns will use AI and what that use will do to voters’ decisions. The object in the voter’s hand is unchanged. What it carries no longer looks the same.

Sources

Guardian — Quote source (original article)

FEC Filings Reveal Quiet AI Arms Race in US Campaigns (Image 2) — AI-generated image

FEC Filings Reveal Quiet AI Arms Race in US Campaigns