This election cycle is notable as the first in which artificial intelligence is both a dominant policy debate and a widely deployed political tool. AI enables candidates, campaigns and bad actors to persuade and confuse voters with speed, scale and precision not previously available — and the same techniques are likely to be used against individuals as well.
What to watch
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Persuasion bots: Campaigns are training text-based chatbots to converse in a candidate’s voice. Some voters spend hours interacting with these bots, which gives campaigns granular insight into which messages and phrasings move specific people. Researchers at Yale reported that a bot that discloses it is a bot can be just as persuasive as one that poses as a human.
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Simulated voters: Political operatives are running AI agents that generate large numbers of synthetic voter profiles and test ads on them. This lets teams refine the perfect message — including exact words and images — before those messages reach real voters.
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The AI firehose: Yale’s findings suggest conversational AI persuasion faces practical scaling limits; flooding social media may be the cheaper tactic. Amplifying pre-existing views at scale is likely to win out, and that in turn will influence how large language models respond to future voter queries.
Why this matters
A new battleground is emerging over what the most popular large language models — including Claude, Gemini, Grok and ChatGPT — say about candidates and political positions. The methods that prove effective in this cycle will shape campaign language, targeting strategies and the way public discourse is mediated by AI systems.
For leaders and campaign teams
Executives and campaign staff should monitor these developments closely: how chatbots are used, what data underlies simulated voter models, and how content amplification is executed. Techniques that succeed now are likely to spread and influence future campaigns and public interactions with AI.
Note
This article summarizes observed trends in AI use during the current election cycle. Readers interested in business-focused briefings may consider subscribing to Jim’s weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.
