AI Tech / news
ChatGPT dominates paid AI use in Congress, spending records show
House disbursement records reveal OpenAI's ChatGPT captured roughly 90% of all AI tool spending by congressional offices in the year ending March 31, with staff using it for drafting memos, summarizing legislation, and constituent communications.
House spending records covering the 12 months through March 31 show OpenAI received approximately $100,580 across 798 transactions from House offices, committees, and institutional accounts, out of at least $113,740 in total AI spending. That puts ChatGPT far ahead of other AI tools on Capitol Hill.
Anthropic's Claude trailed in second place, with $13,160 spent across 37 transactions during the same period. The figures come from House disbursement records and reflect only paid AI subscriptions, excluding free accounts or AI features bundled into broader software contracts.
The records also show a partisan gap in adoption: Democratic offices spent $54,165 on AI purchases, more than three times the $15,782 spent by Republican offices.
Congressional staffers are using ChatGPT and similar tools for a range of tasks, including writing memos, summarizing and analyzing legislation, preparing hearing materials, sorting through policy research, and drafting social media posts. Constituent communications have also become a common use case, according to the spending review.