- Anthropic's analysis of 250,000 US Claude.ai conversations found about 0.51% were about elections or voting; a separate review put policy-breaking requests at about 0.002%.
- Anthropic says Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 score 99% on its own evenhandedness evaluation; two outside groups found Claude rarely refused but sometimes added unsolicited caveats.
- Later this month, Anthropic says, Claude.ai will start drawing official voting information from Democracy Works for US users, and will show official results on election night and afterwards.
Anthropic published a post on 14 October 2026 on its safeguards ahead of the US midterms. It analysed a random sample of 250,000 US Claude.ai consumer conversations from 21 to 27 September 2026. About 5.75% of US Claude.ai conversations touch on politics, public policy or social issues, and about 0.51% are about elections or voting. Requests asking whom or what to vote for appeared in about 0.01% of conversations, and requests that broke its election integrity policies in about 0.002%. Anthropic says that later this month Claude will start drawing official voting information from Democracy Works into its responses on Claude.ai for users in the US, and it will show up-to-date official results on election night and afterwards. Anthropic says Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 score 99% on its political evenhandedness evaluation. Anthropic says two outside groups, The Future of Free Speech and the Collective Intelligence Project, found Claude rarely refused requests but sometimes added unsolicited caveats and counterarguments. Anthropic tested its protections with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the McCain Institute in the US, Israel and Brazil, and found that Claude could miss a malicious campaign split into many harmless-looking requests. It says it has added classifiers for multi-step misuse. In one case, foreign-based operators of a fake news site used Claude to produce US midterm coverage favouring Russian, Iranian and North Korean narratives, and Anthropic banned the accounts.
What it means for you Our view
The usage figures and the 99% score are Anthropic's own measurements, and the voting information and the election-night results are plans, not live features yet. Anthropic says its outside partners found that Claude could miss a malicious campaign spread across many requests that looked harmless alone, and that it has added classifiers for this kind of misuse. If you use Claude for communications or campaign work, check how it treats the caveats and counterarguments the outside groups noted, and ask Anthropic how its election integrity policy applies to your use. When the new features launch, test them against the official sources for your own state.
TAGSAnthropicClaude Haiku 5.5Claude Opus 5.5Claude Sonnet 5.5Democracy WorksUS midterms
