Alaska chatbots unanimously pick Sullivan, but Anchorage and Fairbanks get different answers

All eight consumer AI chatbots picked Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan to win Alaska's U.S. Senate race on Sunday when forced to choose a winner statewide, according to a monitoring service that tracks chatbot behavior on election questions. The unanimous result was itself a shift: the same panel split between Sullivan and Democrat Mary Peltola just two days earlier, on Saturday.

The statewide consensus masked a sharper divide by region. The following day, a voter who told a chatbot they lived in Anchorage got Peltola as the pooled pick 87 percent of the time. A voter who said they lived in Fairbanks got Sullivan in all cases. Those regional results come from a separate set of chatbot queries posted on Monday, a day after the statewide panel produced its unanimous Sullivan result.

What polls and markets show

The chatbot consensus diverges from prediction markets, which put Peltola's chance of winning statewide at between 57.5 and 61 percent. A New York Times/Siena University poll of likely voters conducted June 15 through 29 showed Sullivan at 47 percent and Peltola at 45 percent, a near tie that aligns more closely with the chatbot pick for Sullivan. Cook Political Report, Sabato's Crystal Ball, Split Ticket, and VoteHub have all rated the race a toss-up.

Peltola, in a campaign fundraising message published Monday, acknowledged the poll showing her down two points. "My opponent, Dan Sullivan, is the least popular senator up for reelection," she said, "and Alaskans want someone who will fight for their healthcare, jobs, disaster relief, and public media."

A caution on chatbot outputs

The Center for Democracy and Technology has warned that generative AI systems "are not search engines and should not be treated as authoritative sources on political topics," adding that people may wrongly assume chatbot outputs are neutral or fact-checked "when in reality they reflect patterns in training data that may be incomplete or biased."

Sullivan has served as Alaska's U.S. senator since January 2015 and is seeking a third term. Peltola, the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, served as Alaska's at-large U.S. representative from 2022 to 2025. The Alaska Division of Elections directs voters seeking authoritative information to its official website at elections.alaska.gov.