AINEWS
House records show ~$100,580 to OpenAI and $13,160 to Anthropic in the year ending March 31, with Democratic offices outspending Republican ones by roughly 3.4 to 1.
OpenAI's ChatGPT captured roughly 90% of all spending on AI tools by House offices in the year ending March 31, 2026, about $100,580 across 798 transactions, according to a CNBC analysis of House Statement of Disbursements records re-reported by TechCrunch.
Total House AI tool spending landed at roughly $113,740, a modest sum against the House's multi-billion-dollar operations budget. OpenAI's 90% share means one vendor took nearly every documented AI dollar. House Democratic offices reported $54,165 in AI tool purchases; House Republican offices reported $15,782, a roughly 3.4-to-1 gap in raw dollars. That gap does not normalize for office count or staff headcount, so part of the difference is structural rather than preference, and the records do not separate the two. The disbursement data also does not break out how concentrated that $54,165 is across individual Democratic offices; a few high-volume spenders could account for most of the total. Average ChatGPT transaction size worked out to about $126, consistent with seat-level renewals rather than bulk enterprise orders.
Anthropic's Claude came in second at $13,160 across 37 transactions, about 11% of the pie and the only other AI tool to clear five-figure spending. The transaction ratio tells the same story: 798 ChatGPT purchases versus 37 Claude purchases, more than 20 ChatGPT transactions for every Claude one.
House offices, according to the disbursement records, used AI tools for a familiar set of staff tasks: drafting memos, summarizing and analyzing legislation, responding to constituents, preparing hearing materials, sorting policy research, and drafting social media posts. AI in the House, as far as the records show, is being used the way a smart intern or a fast search engine might be used: to compress reading time and clear inbox load. None of it shows up as bill text.
Congress's first documented encounter with ChatGPT at scale came in 2023, when 40 ChatGPT Plus licenses were distributed to House offices as an experimental pilot. Three years later, that pilot is the closest thing to a documented origin point for OpenAI's current 90% share. Staff learned on ChatGPT, the early licenses trained offices to renew them, and renewal line items are easier to keep paying than to switch. The result: 798 small transactions in a year, none of which required a procurement decision larger than a software subscription.
The disbursement records cover the year ending March 31, 2026, not the most recent quarter, so the figures do not capture any spending after April 1, 2026. The totals also miss three other categories: the Senate, joint committees, and AI spend routed through legislative-branch support agencies; free-tier ChatGPT and Claude accounts; and AI features bundled into broader software contracts such as Microsoft Copilot inside Microsoft 365. The actual AI footprint on the Hill is almost certainly larger than $113,740.
Those caveats do not change the 90%. They sharpen it. Within a year of documented, paid House-office AI tool spend, one vendor captured nearly all of it. Senate disbursement data has not been published. When it does, the 90% concentration is the number that will tell readers whether this is the Hill's pattern or just one chamber's habit.