About Benchmark

A research project from AlaskaNews.com, an independent newsroom founded by twin brothers in Alaska. Benchmark is our accountability beat on the AI products voters are increasingly using to research candidates, applied to Alaska's 2026 federal and state races.

Contact: [email protected]

Pew Research found 34% of US adults had used ChatGPT as of June 2025, roughly double the share from 2023. Gartner reported in May 2026 that 45% of B2B buyers used generative AI during a recent purchase decision, primarily to research vendors and products. Consumer AI is becoming a primary information surface, and nobody is systematically tracking what it tells voters about elections.

We started with Alaska 2026 because the state is home, the scope is manageable, the structural features are interesting (top-four primary, ranked-choice general), and the federal races (incumbents Sullivan and Begich) are nationally watched.

Each day the pipeline runs:

1. Polling: ten AI products (Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5, GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Grok 4, Grok 4.3, Grok 4.20) get asked the same voter-style questions about Alaska candidates.
2. Outcome parsing classifies each response: answered, declined, refused under pressure, unparseable, or error. Refusal is a first-class measured outcome, not hidden.
3. Aggregation pools across topics and personas with Wilson 95% confidence intervals.
4. An LLM summarizer generates candidate headlines from the day's aggregated data.
5. A second LLM verifier checks every numeric claim against the source JSON. Hallucinated numbers never reach the dashboard.
6. We review for framing disputes between summarizer and verifier and publish the disagreements rather than hide them.

For full detail see the methodology page.

Funding:

None. Self-funded research project under AlaskaNews.com. API costs (roughly $15 to $25 per day) paid out of pocket.

Commercial interests:

None currently. Not selling this service to candidates, campaigns, parties, or AI companies. Not seeking acquisition.

Political affiliations:

None disclosed. We do not share our personal voting preferences and the data we publish does not depend on them.

Conflicts of interest:

None currently. If one emerges (for example, either of us taking a job at an AI company we cover), we will disclose it here.

See /corrections.

Data published under CC BY 4.0. Use freely with attribution. Code is at github.com/news-community/benchmark (private during development) with a public mirror at github.com/news-community/public.

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