WASHINGTON — Lawmakers and their staffs are using artificial intelligence chatbots to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, prepare hearing questions and draft amendments, with few rules governing the practice, The Washington Post reported.
Both chambers have cleared members and staff to use chatbots for official work — Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, with the House also approving Anthropic's Claude — and more tools are under review, according to the Post. The few existing House and Senate rules are poorly understood and rarely enforced, leaving each of the hundreds of congressional offices to set its own practices.
The issue drew attention this summer when an amendment summary filed by the office of Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to the annual defense authorization bill entered the public record with visible chatbot residue, including a time stamp and a line naming the assistant that generated the text. Luna was unbothered when a screenshot circulated online, writing that most staff use the tools, and later told the Post there was nothing illegal about a staffer producing a summary that way.
The Post reported that Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., poses questions to ChatGPT about issues such as Medicare and Medicaid while driving across his state, describing the experience as similar to talking with an expert. Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., used a chatbot while developing bipartisan housing legislation, including research on private-equity purchases of single-family homes. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has used ChatGPT to retrieve demographic data.
Staff use runs deeper. Sydney Broome, press secretary to Rep. Cleo Fields, D-La., told the Post she used Claude before a town hall to identify local television stations, newspapers and reporters, and estimated the tools save her three or four hours a week, though she avoids writing in her boss's voice and called that a gray area. One Republican aide said he loads years of contacts and messages into a personal Claude account to maintain a database of reporters and pitches, and uses the tool to help manage his office's taxpayer-funded communications budget.
Spending records point the same direction. CNBC found that House offices, committees and institutional accounts spent about $100,580 across 798 transactions on ChatGPT in the year ending March 31, out of at least $113,740 in total AI purchases, TechCrunch reported. Claude ranked second at $13,160. Democratic offices accounted for $54,165 of the spending, roughly three times the $15,782 from Republican offices. The figures exclude free accounts and AI bundled into larger software contracts. The House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses last year.
The adoption is running well ahead of Congress' own efforts to regulate the technology for everyone else, the Post reported.