Congress offices in Washington have spent at least $113,740 on commercial AI chatbots within a year, with a clear dominance for a single provider. This is shown by an evaluation of payout documents from the U.S. House of Representatives by the broadcaster CNBC. About 90 percent of the total amount went to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with only a fraction going to the competition from Anthropic.
CNBC Evaluates Payout Data From the House of Representatives
The documents examined by CNBC cover the period from April 2025 to the end of March 2026. During this time, $100,580 flowed to ChatGPT through 798 individual transactions – about 90 percent of the total identifiable AI expenditures of the House of Representatives. Anthropic’s Claude only reached $13,160 in the same period with 37 transactions, which is less than one-eighth of the ChatGPT amount.
ChatGPT purchases can be traced to at least 71 congressional offices, as TechCrunch reports, citing the CNBC figures – mathematically about one in six offices in the House of Representatives. Staff use the tools primarily for three tasks: drafting memos, summarizing bills, and responding to constituent inquiries. The chatbots are also used to prepare hearing materials and for general policy research. The magazine Quartz independently confirmed the central figures of the CNBC evaluation. The House of Representatives has not yet published its own official statistics on AI expenditures – the figures come solely from the journalistic evaluation of individual payout items. Congress is thus part of a broader trend: ChatGPT is increasingly establishing itself as a tool for office tasks. OpenAI further advanced this development in July 2026 with the independently operating agent ChatGPT Work.
Democratic Offices Spend Significantly More Than Republican Ones
The distribution by party shows a clear disparity: Democratic congressional offices spent $54,165 on AI tools during the examined period, while Republican offices spent only $15,782. Together, both amounts total about $70,000 – the remainder of the total expenditures is attributed to institutional accounts and committees that cannot be assigned to a single faction. The evaluation does not provide an official reason for the disparity between the parties. It is likely due more to differing procurement readiness of individual offices than to a central directive from the respective faction.
CNBC itself points out that the figures do not represent the complete AI usage in Congress. Free accounts do not appear in the payout documents, nor do AI functions that are already embedded in existing software contracts like Microsoft Copilot. The majority of expenditures in the Senate are also missing from the survey. The second chamber of Congress manages its own accounts separately from the House of Representatives and has not allowed Claude for official purposes according to its own chamber rules.
The lead of ChatGPT also dates back historically further. In 2023, the House Digital Service, the IT department of the House of Representatives, awarded the first 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses to a bipartisan group of staff members. OpenAI subsequently collaborated with the Congressional Management Foundation on training for congressional staff.
It will be crucial whether the dominance of a single provider is confirmed in future payout audits or whether growing competition softens it. For public institutions that commit early to a chatbot, this creates a dependency on a single provider, raising questions beyond the U.S. Congress.
