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Politics ChatGPT plugins were a small set of third-party tools that connected ChatGPT to legislative data, voting records, lobbying disclosures, party donation records, and political document archives between March 2023 and April 2024. The category covered the United States Congress, the United Kingdom Parliament, the German Bundestag, the Brazilian Congress, and the executive branch of the United States federal government. It opened with FiscalNote on March 23, 2023 as part of the inaugural plugin slate and closed on April 9, 2024 when OpenAI shut the plugin store down in favour of Custom GPTs and the GPT Store.[1][2]
This article serves as a historical reference. The plugins listed here are no longer reachable inside ChatGPT, although several developers continued to operate the underlying APIs and apps. The category was unusual among plugin groupings because it pressed against OpenAI's usage policy, which since March 2023 had prohibited products built for political campaigning or lobbying. Tooling that simply surfaced public legislative data was permitted, and that boundary defined what survived as a politics plugin during the platform's twelve-month run.[3]
Third-party plugin directories did not enforce a single fixed taxonomy. Tools that touched government data appeared under several overlapping tags including Politics, Legal, Government, and Public Affairs. This wiki places primary-law lookup tools (codified statutes and judicial opinions) inside law chatgpt plugins. The politics category covers the political layer above primary law: who is in office, how they voted, who is funding them, what they said in public, and what bills are moving through legislatures. The full plugin taxonomy is mapped in chatgpt plugin categories, which lists Politics with the description "voting records, legislative tracking, and political analysis." FiscalNote spanned both buckets because it covered legal, political, and regulatory data in a single integration, and is therefore cross-listed in the law category as well.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023 with twelve external partners (Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, KAYAK, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier) plus a first-party browsing plugin and a code interpreter.[1][4] FiscalNote was the inaugural slate's only legal, political, and regulatory data partner. The company described itself in its own press release as the sole provider of that kind of information among the launch partners.[5]
The wider politics category took shape after OpenAI opened the plugin store to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers on May 12, 2023, with the store going generally available the following week.[6] Quiver Quantitative and UK Politics appear in third-party catalogues from June 20, 2023, and FaceTheFacts from June 26, 2023.[7][8][9] The category never grew large. By the time the plugin store shut down it held no more than a handful of dedicated politics tools, supplemented by overlapping legal-research and finance plugins that touched political data from the side.
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | OpenAI announces ChatGPT plugins; FiscalNote is the inaugural legal, political, and regulatory data partner[1][5] |
| April 19, 2023 | FiscalNote announces the VoterVoice SmartCheck integration with ChatGPT for grassroots advocacy email campaigns[10] |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces broad rollout of plugins to ChatGPT Plus subscribers[6] |
| May 17, 2023 | Semafor reports that OpenAI told FiscalNote to remove lobbying-and-advocacy language from its press release; the references were replaced with an editor's note[3] |
| June 20, 2023 | UK Politics, Quiver Quantitative, FiscalNote (under its independent plugin manifest), and Talk Law Brazil appear in directory catalogues[7][8][11][12] |
| June 26, 2023 | FaceTheFacts joins, covering the German Bundestag[9] |
| November 6, 2023 | OpenAI DevDay introduces GPTs[13] |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens[14] |
| January 15, 2024 | OpenAI publishes its 2024 worldwide elections approach, formalising the ban on applications for political campaigning and lobbying and on chatbots impersonating candidates or local governments[15] |
| March 19, 2024 | Plugin store closes; new plugin chats end[2] |
| April 9, 2024 | Remaining plugin conversations end and the platform fully shuts down[2] |
The large language model behind ChatGPT in 2023 (initially GPT-3.5, then GPT-4 for paid users) was not a reliable source on political matters by itself. Its training data ended in 2021 for the original release, so it could not see new bills, sworn-in officials, or recent floor votes, and it lacked any structured handle on legislative process, party finance, or roll call data. Politics plugins addressed those gaps by reaching out at query time to a dedicated political-data API. Typical capabilities included lookup of a sitting politician's voting record on named legislation, search across speeches, manifestos, and press releases, tracking of bills in progress with committee status and sponsorship, disclosure-driven views of party donations, side jobs, insider trades, and lobbying spend, retrieval of public statements from heads of state, and postcode lookups that returned the relevant elected representatives.
A politics plugin response normally returned a structured object (a politician profile, a bill identifier with status, or a vote tally with date) paired with a natural-language summary written by ChatGPT and a link back to the underlying database. A single ChatGPT session could load up to three plugins at once, which pushed users toward deliberate prompt engineering with explicit instructions to refuse if no source was returned and to quote bill numbers and section identifiers verbatim.
The politics category sat under tighter rules than most other plugin groupings because of OpenAI's usage policy. In late March 2023 OpenAI updated its policies to ban products built for political campaigning or lobbying. The first publicly visible enforcement action came less than a month later. After FiscalNote's April 19, 2023 press release announcing the VoterVoice SmartCheck integration touted ChatGPT's value to "the multi-billion dollar lobbying and advocacy industry" and to "enhance political participation," OpenAI told the company to remove that language. FiscalNote replaced the relevant lines with an editor's note clarifying that ChatGPT could be used solely for grassroots advocacy campaigns.[3] The episode, first reported by Semafor on May 17, 2023, was the earliest known instance of OpenAI policing how third parties advertised the use of its technology. The practical effect was that politics plugins had to position themselves as transparency, journalism, or research tools rather than as campaign aids, and OpenAI's January 2024 election-integrity post locked that boundary in for the remainder of the plugin era.[15]
The table below lists plugins for which launch information can be confirmed in at least two independent sources. Tools that could not be verified are omitted.
| Plugin | Function | Developer | Verified period |
|---|---|---|---|
| FiscalNote | Real-time legal, political, and regulatory data drawn from the Biden Remarks API, the Roll Call API, and the White House calendar API | FiscalNote Holdings, Inc. (plugin contact: Collin Stedman) | Live from March 23, 2023 (inaugural launch slate)[1][5][16] |
| UK Politics | Search across UK political documents including manifestos, speeches, press releases, voting records, and candidate profiles, with postcode-driven lookups | Joe (politicsplugin.com) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[8] |
| Quiver Quantitative | Congressional stock trading, corporate lobbying spend, insider trades, and proposed legislation summaries | Quiver Quantitative (Christopher and James Kardatzke) | Catalogued from June 20, 2023[7][17] |
| FaceTheFacts | Profiles of German politicians with voting records, side jobs, party donations, and tracked political speeches; data drawn from abgeordnetenwatch.de, the Bundestag, and Wikidata | Face The Facts team, CODE University Berlin (Victor Bellu and colleagues) | Catalogued from June 26, 2023[9][18] |
FiscalNote was the only legal, political, and regulatory data provider in the inaugural twelve-partner slate that OpenAI unveiled on March 23, 2023.[1][5] The company was founded in June 2013 in Sunnyvale, California by Timothy Hwang, Gerald Yao, and Jonathan Chen, and had spent a decade aggregating legislation, regulations, and government filings from federal, state, and local agencies.[19] Its plugin exposed three concrete data sources to the model: the Biden Remarks API for spoken or written statements made by President Biden, the Roll Call API for news articles about Congressional people and proceedings (drawn from the CQ Roll Call newsroom that FiscalNote acquired from The Economist Group in July 2018), and the White House calendar API for the official calendar of the executive branch.[16][19] The plugin focused on the political and regulatory layer rather than judicial opinions or codified statutes. The company later launched VoterVoice SmartCheck as a separate ChatGPT integration on April 19, 2023 for grassroots advocacy email campaigns, which became the focal point of the policy-line dispute described above.[10]
UK Politics, hosted at politics-plugin.onrender.com and registered to the email address joe@politicsplugin.com, was added to the plugin store on June 20, 2023.[8] It exposed seven endpoints: partyQuery for political party communications, personQuery for a single politician's appearances and votes on a topic, personGet for a politician's profile, peopleQuery for multi-politician searches, postcodeQuery for postcode-driven lookups of representatives and candidates, electionsGet for UK election information, and singleElectionGet for individual election records. Authentication required an API key. The plugin let a reader ask plain-language questions about voting records, manifesto positions, or candidates by postcode and get back a structured answer drawn from speeches, manifestos, press releases, voting records, and candidate profiles. The plugin store closed before the May 2024 UK general election cycle hit full swing.
Quiver Quantitative was an investment-research platform built by twin brothers Christopher and James Kardatzke during their time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.[17] The company specialised in surfacing alternative datasets that retail investors normally could not access, with congressional stock trading as its flagship product. The plugin, hosted at api.quiverquant.com and added on June 20, 2023, exposed four endpoints: bulk_congressional_stock_trading for recent trades by US senators and representatives (filterable by ticker), historical_lobbying_ticker for corporate lobbying activity by ticker symbol and issue, live_insiders_ticker for insider stock transactions, and live_billSummaries for summaries of legislation recently acted on in Congress.[7] The plugin sat at the seam between politics and finance. The Stock Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act required US legislators to publicly disclose financial transactions within 45 days, and Quiver's data feed turned those disclosures into a queryable resource. The plugin's politics relevance was strongest in the lobbying and bill-summary endpoints.
FaceTheFacts was an open-source, non-profit transparency project founded in 2019 by Victor Bellu and colleagues from CODE University in Berlin. The original product was a mobile app that let users scan a German election poster with a phone camera and pull up the candidate's voting record, side jobs, controversies, and party-funding history. The project was funded under public-interest grants from Wikimedia, the Prototype Fund, and German government programmes, and pulled its underlying data from abgeordnetenwatch.de, the Bundestag, Politrack, OpenParliament TV, and Wikidata.[18] The ChatGPT plugin, registered to info@facethefacts.app and added on June 26, 2023, exposed six endpoints: politicianProfile for detailed background and career, searchPoliticians for queries by stance or affiliation, displayVotingRecord for vote-by-vote roll call, analyzeSideJobs for outside earnings and conflict-of-interest checks, trackPoliticalSpeeches for monitored statements, and monitorPartyDonations for party-funding flows.[9] It required no user authentication and was the only plugin in the politics category focused exclusively on the German Bundestag.
Several plugins not listed above touched the politics category from neighbouring buckets. Talk Law Brazil exposed bills currently in progress in the Brazilian Congress through its get_laws_dict and get_law_info endpoints, putting one foot inside the legislative-tracking remit even though its primary tag was law.[12] Lei Brasileira pushed updates on Brazilian legislation and was filed under legal consultation.[20] No verified politics plugin reached the store covering France, the European Parliament, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, Mexico, or any African legislature.
OpenAI gave roughly three weeks of notice between the March 19, 2024 freeze on new conversations and the April 9, 2024 shutdown.[2] The reasons for the wider plugin retirement were structural. Discovery had been poor, the plugin store was a flat list with limited search and no ratings, the three-plugins-per-chat limit forced uncomfortable tradeoffs, and the manifest-plus-OpenAPI requirement raised the bar on small civic-tech projects. GPTs, announced at OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023 and surfaced through the GPT Store from January 10, 2024, allowed lighter no-code authoring, kept Actions for full external integrations, and folded into the same chat surface.[13][14]
The politics category faced a second, narrower constraint. On January 15, 2024 OpenAI published "How OpenAI is approaching 2024 worldwide elections," which formalised what the FiscalNote episode had already implied: applications built for political campaigning and lobbying, chatbots that pretended to be real candidates or local governments, and tools designed to deter participation in democratic processes were not allowed.[15] OpenAI committed to applying the rules to GPTs and to providing a reporting mechanism for violations. The election-integrity post landed five days after the GPT Store opened and roughly two months before the plugin store shut down, and it shaped what kinds of political GPTs could replace the deprecated plugins.
Politics-plugin functionality moved to three kinds of successor. After the GPT Store opened, several developers rebuilt their tools as Custom GPTs, although the new election-integrity rules narrowed the category. Native ChatGPT browsing matured through 2023 and 2024 and could read public legislative websites directly. Vendor-side enterprise products, with FiscalNote the leading example, continued to sell their data through dedicated dashboards and APIs to corporate, governmental, and policy-shop subscribers. The category never produced a durable answer to the campaigning-or-lobbying line, and the question carried into the GPT Store under tighter election-year guardrails.
See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Politics