Anthropic strengthens election safeguards ahead of 2026 US midterms
Original titlePreparing for the 2026 US midterms
- Outlet
- Anthropic News
- Published
- Importance
- 3/5
Summary
Anthropic analyzed 250,000 Claude.ai conversations over one week, finding that about 5.75 percent touch on politics or policy, while 0.51 percent concern elections or voting. Requests asking who or what to vote for appeared in only 0.01 percent of US conversations.
Original excerpt
Earlier this year, we shared an update on our election safeguards, which described how we measure and prevent political bias, detect misuse, and direct people to accurate voting information. Below, we outline how we’ve built on that work and continued to strengthen our election safeguards ahead of this year’s US midterms. How people use Claude for elections and politics Our goal is for Claude to be a useful tool for political conversations, while preventing election-related abuse. That starts with understanding how people actually use Claude in these contexts. To do this, we used Anthropic Insights to develop a new analysis of 250,000 conversations over the course of a recent one-week period.1 Today, conversations that touch broadly on politics, public policy or social issues account for about 5.75% of all conversations in the United States on Claude.ai, our consumer app. This includes people turning to Claude to follow the news, conduct academic or professional research on public policy, learn about candidates, and navigate government services. About 0.51% of all conversations are specifically about elections or voting. As we get closer to Election Day, we expect the share of political and election-related queries to increase. This sample suggests people rarely ask Claude who or what to vote for. These kinds of requests showed up in about 0.01% of US Claude conversations. More often, we observed people asking Claude questions that could help them reach their own conclusions, like where candidates stand on a particular issue. Requests that violated our election integrity policies were even less common, appearing in about 0.002% of conversations.2 How many US Claude.ai conversations touch on politics, are about elections, or ask Claude whom or what to vote for. Each dot represents 1 in every 10,000 conversations in a random sample of about 250,000 US Claude.ai consumer conversations from September 21 to 27, 2026, which Claude classified using a privacy-preserving met