House AI-Tool Spending Reached $70,985 in Q1 2026, POPVOX Finds

OpenAI and ChatGPT represented $112,442.23 across 916 matched rows, about 72% of the five-quarter total. Otter.ai followed at $19,882.66, Anthropic and Claude at $13,395.62, Descript at $9,179.38, other AI apps at $1,492.99, and xAI and Grok at $300.00.

Member offices accounted for $102,953.45, roughly two-thirds of the matched spending, while committees accounted for $33,902.08. The report also compared those explicit AI categories with broader legislative-intelligence and platform vendors, which totaled about $6.21 million over the same loaded House periods. POPVOX kept those broader vendors separate because a Microsoft, Google, or data-platform payment does not establish that the purchase was for an AI feature.

The House describes its Statement of Disbursements as a quarterly public record of receipts and expenditures for members, committees, leadership, officers, and institutional offices. POPVOX applied vendor and description matching to those public rows; its category totals are therefore an analysis of identifiable purchases rather than an official House classification.

The method necessarily misses free accounts, AI capabilities bundled into larger contracts, and tools paid under vendor names that do not reveal the product. It also cannot show how often a purchased tool was used or whether it became part of a consequential workflow. POPVOX found no explicit named AI-tool matches in the Senate data available to its scan, but said that result reflects the limits of the parsed aggregate and sample records rather than proof that Senate offices were not using AI.

For practitioners studying public-sector adoption, the report is useful as a transparent procurement signal. It should not be treated as a complete census of AI access, usage, or policy compliance.