# Anthropic Adds Democracy Works Voting Data to Claude Before US Midterms, Reports Banning Influence-Op Accounts

Times of AI Desk · 2026-10-15 · Frontier Labs

[https://timesof.ai/2026/10/anthropic-midterm-election-safeguards-democracy-works](https://timesof.ai/2026/10/anthropic-midterm-election-safeguards-democracy-works)

> Anthropic said on Oct. 14 that Claude.ai will draw official voting information from Democracy Works for US users later this month. It also said it banned accounts of foreign-based operators of a fake news site who used Claude for midterm coverage favoring Russian, Iranian and North Korean narratives.

Outside testers from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the McCain Institute found that Claude's per-request refusals could miss an election-abuse campaign split into harmless-looking pieces, Anthropic said. In an **October 14** post, **Anthropic** said that later this month Claude will start drawing official voting information from the nonprofit **Democracy Works** into its responses on Claude.ai for US users, and will show up-to-date official results on election night. Reuters also reported the announcement.

According to Anthropic, the testers found that Claude "reliably refused a single harmful request, but could miss a malicious campaign when it was spread across many individual requests that looked harmless on their own." It says it has since added classifiers for novel and multi-step misuse.

In one case, "foreign-based operators of a fake news site used Claude to produce US midterm coverage favoring Russian, Iranian, and North Korean narratives," Anthropic says; others used Claude to produce fabricated news for ad revenue. It says it banned the accounts involved.

In a sample of about 250,000 US Claude.ai consumer conversations from September 21 to 27, about 5.75% touched on politics, public policy or social issues and about 0.51% were about elections or voting, according to the post.

## Limits

- All figures and findings are Anthropic's; account counts and operator identities were not given. The usage figures cover the US consumer app only.

## Sources

- [Anthropic: Preparing for the 2026 US midterms (October 14, 2026)](https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-us-midterms)
- [Reuters via The Economic Times: Anthropic to add US voting information to Claude before midterms (October 15, 2026)](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/anthropic-to-add-us-voting-information-to-claude-before-midterms/articleshow/134955974.cms)