ChatGPT captured 90% of Congress's AI spending last year

ChatGPT is the overwhelming favorite among U.S. House staffers when it comes to paid AI tools, accounting for roughly 90% of all identified AI spending by House offices, committees and institutional accounts in the year ending March 31, 2026.

The total documented outlay came to at least $113,740, a modest sum by federal budgeting standards but a telling signal of which vendor has won the day-to-day workflow battle on Capitol Hill. OpenAI alone collected $100,580 across 798 separate transactions.

Anthropic's Claude came in a distant second, drawing $13,160 across 37 transactions. That gap, roughly eight to one in dollar terms, suggests ChatGPT isn't just more popular but embedded in far more offices' recurring purchasing habits.

A partisan spending gap

The numbers also break down sharply along party lines. Democratic offices spent $54,165 on AI tools during the period, more than triple the $15,782 spent by Republican offices.

Staffers reportedly rely on these tools for drafting memos, summarizing and analyzing pending legislation, responding to constituent mail, prepping hearing materials, running policy research and even writing social media posts. That range covers much of the daily grind of legislative staff work, from casework to committee prep.

What the numbers don't capture

The figures come from direct, itemized purchases and likely understate real usage. They don't account for staffers using free-tier ChatGPT accounts, nor for AI features quietly bundled into broader software licenses that offices already pay for.

That caveat matters: actual AI adoption inside the House could be considerably higher than the disclosed spending implies, since free access and embedded features leave no line item behind. Still, the paid-transaction data offers the clearest available proxy for which AI vendors have become institutional defaults rather than personal experiments.

For OpenAI, the figures reinforce a pattern seen across other institutional and enterprise buyers: even as rivals like Anthropic court regulated and public-sector customers, ChatGPT's early mover advantage and brand recognition appear to be translating into durable purchasing habits inside one of Washington's most bureaucratic environments.