Congress’s favorite AI tool? ChatGPT

House disbursement records tell a pretty clear story: when Congress reaches for AI, it reaches for ChatGPT. CNBC's dig through the numbers found offices, committees, and institutional accounts spent about $100,580 across 798 separate transactions on OpenAI's tool during the year ending March 31. That's roughly 90 cents of every AI dollar Congress spent.

Anthropic's Claude picked up the scraps, at $13,160 spread across 37 transactions. Total AI spending on Capitol Hill came to at least $113,740, which is not exactly a rounding error but also isn't much for an institution with 435 voting members and thousands of staffers. The number almost certainly undercounts real usage, since it excludes free ChatGPT accounts and any AI features bundled into larger software contracts staffers might already have.

There's a partisan split worth pausing on. Democratic offices spent $54,165 on AI tools, roughly triple the $15,782 that Republican offices spent. Whether that reflects different appetites for the technology, different budget priorities, or just which offices happened to sign up first isn't clear from the disbursement data alone.

What staffers are actually doing with these tools sounds a lot like what everyone else does with them: drafting memos, summarizing bills nobody wants to read in full, answering constituent emails, prepping hearing materials, digging through policy research, and yes, banging out social media posts. None of that is glamorous. But it's the kind of grinding paperwork that eats staff hours, and apparently enough offices decided a chatbot subscription was worth the line item.

The bigger picture here is that the institution writing AI policy is also becoming an AI customer, and its purchasing habits look a lot like the broader market's. OpenAI's dominance in enterprise-style spending on Capitol Hill mirrors what's happening in plenty of other white-collar workplaces, where ChatGPT got there first and stuck.