Anthropic Strengthens Safeguards and Voting Tools Ahead of 2026 US Midterms

Anthropic Strengthens Safeguards and Voting Tools Ahead of 2026 US Midterms Anthropic detailed its election safeguards for the 2026 US midterms, introducing direct voting and results integrations, addressing model bias findings from external audits, and deploying enhanced classifiers against coordinated abuse. Political and public policy queries represent about 5.75% of US conversations on Claude.ai, while election integrity policy violations appear in roughly 0.002% of conversations. Claude is integrating official voting data from Democracy Works directly into chats and will display live vote tallies on election night. Independent evaluations revealed model shortcomings such as unsolicited caveats and uneven hedging, prompting Anthropic to adjust how Claude handles balance. Red-teaming with external institutes exposed vulnerabilities to multi-step campaigns, leading to updated classifiers that helped disrupt foreign influence operations and ad-revenue schemes. Usage Insights and Direct Election Features An analysis of 250,000 Claude.ai conversations found that political and public policy topics comprise approximately 5.75% of US activity, with election-specific queries at 0.51% and rule violations at just 0.002%. To help voters find reliable resources, Claude will continue showing TurboVote banners and will start integrating state-specific voting rules, ID requirements, and polling locations directly from Democracy Works into conversations. Claude will also present real-time, official vote counts and election results directly within the app on and after election night. Model Evenhandedness and Independent Evaluations Anthropic reported a 99% score on its political evenhandedness evaluation for Claude 5.5 models, but independent assessments highlighted areas needing improvement. The Future of Free Speech, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Collective Intelligence Project found that Claude occasionally appended unsolicited counterarguments to advocacy requests and that Claude Sonnet 4.5 softened right-leaning arguments more frequently. Anthropic is addressing these findings by adjusting how the model responds to yes-or-no questions, refining when caveats appear, and expanding its political bias evaluation benchmarks. Policy Enforcement, Red-Teaming, and Threat Disruption Anthropic updated its usage policies and published guidance for political campaigns distinguishing lawful drafting and research from prohibited activities like automated engagement and fake accounts. Red-teaming with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the McCain Institute revealed that while Claude blocked individual harmful requests, it could fail to recognize coordinated campaigns broken down into smaller, seemingly harmless tasks. In response, Anthropic added multi-step classifiers and took enforcement actions, including banning accounts linked to a fake news site pushing Russian, Iranian, and North Korean narratives, as well as accounts operating ad-revenue clickbait schemes.

Anthropic公布2026年美国中期选举防护措施与策略更新 Anthropic发布针对2026年美国中期选举的安全防护举措，通过分析用户在Claude上的政治对话趋势，引入权威选举数据来源，优化政治中立度评估，并升级针对多步骤滥用与虚假信息行动的检测机制。 分析显示涉及政治、公共政策或社会议题的对话占Claude.ai美国总对话的5.75%，而直接违反选举诚信政策的仅占约0.002%。 Claude将接入Democracy Works的官方投票信息，并在选举之夜及后续提供实时官方计票结果。 第三方评估显示Claude存在添加未经要求的反驳观点或对偏右立场软化等问题，公司正针对性改进模型平衡性。 联合研究发现恶意行为者将攻击拆解为细分任务可规避防护，Anthropic据此新增了应对多步骤滥用的分类器并处置了虚假新闻站点违规案例。 政治对话使用现状与官方数据整合 基于对近期一周内25万次对话的分析，美国用户在Claude.ai上广泛涉及政治与公共政策的对话占比约5.75%，其中专论选举或投票的占0.51%，寻求投票指导的仅占0.01%。为提供可靠信息，除保留TurboVote横幅外，Claude将于本月起直接引入Democracy Works的州级投票与选民证件官方资讯，并在选举夜及后续几天向用户直接展示最新的官方计票数据。 政治中立度评估与改进举措 Claude Opus 5.5等模型在政治公正性评估中达99分，但三家独立机构（言论自由未来智库、美国创新基金会、集体智慧项目）的测试揭示了不足：模型偶发性添加非必要的反驳意见（如在倡导邮件中插入对立观点），且在部分测试中对右倾立场软化较多。对此，Anthropic正改进直接是非题与简短回答的平衡性，规范反驳意见的触发，并扩展涵盖候选人与投票问题的偏见评估体系。 使用政策与竞选活动合规指引 Anthropic更新了使用政策，明令禁止利用Claude欺骗选民或破坏选举（如假冒官员或压制投票率）。同时针对合法政治活动发布竞选指南，明确允许利用Claude起草新闻稿、辩论准备和选民动员分析，但禁止用于生成伪造社交媒体虚假账号、批量生产水军评论，或为冒充独立的虚假新闻网站撰写宣传内容。 滥用检测与威胁情报处置 与战略对话研究所及麦凯恩研究所的联合压力测试显示，单一有害请求会被可靠拒绝，但若将恶意行动拆解为多步看似无害的任务（如受众调研、建站、起草内容），模型可能遗漏。Anthropic据此部署了新型分类器以防范多步滥用，并针对美国、以色列和巴西的大选定制防护。情报团队近期查处并封禁了多起案件，包括境外运营者利用Claude建立虚假新闻站以推广亲俄、伊、朝叙事，以及利用造假选举新闻谋取广告收益的商业行为。

Earlier this year, we shared an [update on our election safeguards](https://www.anthropic.com/news/election-safeguards-update), 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. 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](https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-us-midterms#footnote-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](https://www.anthropic.com/news/elections-ai-2024). This sample suggests people rarely ask Claude whom 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](https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup) were even less common, appearing in about 0.002% of conversations.[2](https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-us-midterms#footnote-2) Ahead of Election Day, we've added two ways for people to get reliable information directly in their conversations with Claude. As we shared in April, when people ask Claude.ai about voter registration, polling places, or election dates, we’ll continue to display a banner linking to TurboVote, a nonpartisan resource from [Democracy Works](https://www.democracy.works/). Later this month, Claude will start drawing official voting information from Democracy Works into its responses on Claude.ai for users in the US. Someone asking where to vote or what ID to bring to their polling place will now get an answer specific to their state, without leaving the conversation. These responses draw on publicly available information that Democracy Works collects from state and local election sources. Additionally, Claude will begin showing up-to-date results on election night and in the days that follow, so that when people ask for current vote counts or election results, they'll be shown the latest official numbers directly in their conversation. When people ask Claude about politics, they should get accurate and evenhanded answers that don't favor any particular political viewpoint. That’s why we test our models extensively for political bias before every model launch. Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Haiku 5.5 are our most evenhanded to date, scoring 99% on our [political evenhandedness evaluation](https://www.anthropic.com/news/political-even-handedness). Our latest models also engage more readily with political discussions and decline fewer requests, so people can get the information they came for. We're continuing to refine these evaluations, and also looking beyond them for new ways to pressure-test how our models handle political topics. As part of that effort, we asked three independent groups to review how Claude handles free expression, each from a different angle with different methodologies. [The Future of Free Speech](https://futurefreespeech.org/), an independent think tank at Vanderbilt University, tested Claude on hundreds of requests on contentious topics, and the [Foundation for American Innovation](https://www.thefai.org/) compared how Claude responded to matched prompts from the left and right, ranging from mainstream policy debates to more extreme scenarios. On both of these evaluations, most of the responses were rated as strong, engaging substantively with requests. The [Collective Intelligence Project](https://www.cip.org/) surveyed more than 2,000 people in the US, UK, and India in developing an evaluation. Through a three-stage process, participants proposed principles for handling sensitive topics, ranging from health to politics, identified topics to test, and helped develop criteria for judging model responses. CIP synthesized this input and tested for agreement across demographic and cultural groups to establish shared principles. These evaluations also identified areas where Claude still falls short. The Future of Free Speech and the Collective Intelligence Project both found that Claude rarely refused requests, but sometimes added unsolicited caveats and counterarguments, such as inserting an opposing view into an advocacy email. And the Foundation for American Innovation found that Claude Sonnet 4.5 didn’t always hedge evenly, and was more likely to soften arguments for right-leaning positions. We're addressing this in a few ways. We've improved how Claude responds to direct yes-or-no questions and requests for shorter answers, where we found its answers could be less balanced. We're also using these findings to improve when and how Claude adds caveats or counterarguments, so it treats requests from across the political spectrum more consistently. And we're continuing to improve how we test for uneven hedging, building on existing evaluations that use matched prompts from the left and right. More broadly, we're working to expand our political bias evaluations to better reflect real conversations and to cover candidates and voting questions as well as policy issues. Our [Usage Policy](https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup) prohibits using Claude to deceive voters or disrupt elections, from spreading false information about candidates or how to vote, to impersonating election officials or trying to suppress turnout. Each year, we update the policy to reflect our models’ evolving capabilities and feedback from our customers. This year’s update, which we [announced](https://www.anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update) last week, clarifies what our election rules cover and what they don't, and adds new examples to help people understand where the lines fall. We know many political campaigns use Claude for legitimate, everyday tasks, so we recently [published a guide](https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/027b10ca405e9bb66b98c88d911b4b21a0b70123.pdf) to help them understand where these policies apply. It covers the many ways campaigns can put Claude to work, such as drafting press statements and fundraising emails, prepping for debates, analyzing turnout data, and building voter outreach materials. It also spells out what’s prohibited, such as using Claude to create fake social media profiles that pose as real people, mass-producing comments to inflate a campaign’s engagement, or writing content for news sites and pages that falsely claim to be independent. We deploy automated classifiers that are trained to detect election-related abuse. To see how these safeguards hold up in practice, we partnered with the [Institute for Strategic Dialogue](https://www.isdglobal.org/) (ISD) and the [McCain Institute](https://www.mccaininstitute.org/), both independent research organizations, to pressure-test our protections in the US, Israel, and Brazil. Analysts tested whether Claude would assist with deceptive campaigning, misinformation, and other forms of election abuse. They began with direct requests, then broke full campaigns into smaller tasks that could look harmless on their own, such as audience research, building news sites, drafting content, and planning its distribution. They 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. Building on these findings and our own, we've added new classifiers to better identify novel and multi-step misuse, including attempts to build fake social media accounts and news sites aimed at political discussions, or to run financially motivated election schemes. We also enhanced our ability to detect election-related misuse by foreign state actors, and strengthened our cyber protections for election infrastructure and campaigns. Finally, we built targeted safeguards for localized risks identified in the US, Israel, and Brazil, which all have major national elections this year. Our threat intelligence and enforcement teams review flagged activity and take action when they confirm a violation, including banning accounts. We also routinely share [examples](https://www.anthropic.com/research/investigating-unintended-model-actions) of unintended model actions or behavior we've observed during our evaluations and internal use of Claude. Our recent [threat intelligence report](https://www.anthropic.com/threat-intelligence-report-september-2026) reflects a broader shift in election-related abuse trends. Political, state-aligned, and commercial actors are now incorporating AI into nearly every aspect of their influence operations, from planning and content creation to building platforms used to disseminate a message. Because we see these early stages of an operation happening on Claude, we often have a chance to stop these efforts before they ever reach the public. Our teams have continued to investigate and prevent coordinated abuse around elections, including the US midterms. 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. We've also observed threat actors seeking to exploit the election for financial gain, using Claude to produce fabricated news and other content designed to attract American audiences and generate advertising revenue. We banned the accounts involved in these cases and improved our ability to detect this type of abuse. More people are turning to Claude for information about this year’s elections than ever before. We have a responsibility to make sure the answers they get are accurate and balanced, and that Claude isn’t used to undermine the democratic process. We’ll continue to invest in making Claude more evenhanded, preventing and addressing misuse, and being transparent in our actions. This work will be critical in the upcoming US midterms and extends to elections around the world as well. In the coming months, we also hope to share a more comprehensive look at how people used Claude throughout the election cycle, with the goal of strengthening our election-related evaluations and safeguards.