Follow the money: How we used AI skills in Claude to research a campaign finance investigation
Every campaign dollar raised in Massachusetts leaves a public record on the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OPCF)website: who contributed, how much was given, when it was donated, and where the money was ultimately spent. By scrutinizing the data using AI, we found that at least 76 former state and municipal officeholders kept spending campaign money, totaling more than $6.5 million, after they left office. You can see the final project here.
The project’s data comes from bank-reported expenditures filed with the OPCF, covering 5,629 payments totaling $6,594,253 by 76 former state and municipal officeholders between Jan. 4, 2021 and Apr. 30, 2026. A payment is counted as post-departure if its date falls after the official’s recorded last day in office. Categories are assigned from the payee name and the stated purpose. We used Claude Opus 5 to categorize spending and to -search the web for relationships between committees and recipients. Afterwards, we manually checked and corrected each officeholder’s office-leaving date.
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