Wiener, backed by Anthropic PAC, uses Claude to skewer his SF rival

State Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat running for Congress who is backed by Anthropic, just launched a chatbot of his opponent — and his team used Claude to do it.

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The website, called ConnieChan.ai, launched on Monday morning and sarcastically refers to itself as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask.” It prompts the user to type in a question, and the bot will spit out an answer impersonating Wiener’s opponent, District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan: “Bring me an idea and I’ll explain why it can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t happen,” it says.

Some of the topics that the bot addresses cover housing, homelessness and other topics that Wiener’s team satirizes, such as “endangering safety” and “failing education.”

Chan and Wiener are the two Democrats running to replace Rep. Nancy Pelosi in Congress. Chan’s campaign said the new chatbot was evidence Wiener was swayed by the artificial intelligence industry.

“If there was ever any doubt that Scott Wiener is bought and paid for by Big AI, he’s not even trying to hide it anymore,” Ian Krager, a representative for Connie Chan, told SFGATE. “We know Wiener is desperate for attention, but it’s never a good idea for a man to put words in a woman’s mouth — especially when they are falsities fraught with racist and sexist undertones.”

Wiener’s team told SFGATE that San Francisco is a “unique place to run for Congress” and that launching an AI-themed ad is very on par for the region and a way to stand out.

“Scott wrote the landmark AI safety laws serving a model for the rest of the country. He’s been thinking about worker safety and delivering on these issues for years. He won’t be learning on the job like Supervisor Chan would,” Joe Arellano, a campaign consultant for Wiener, told SFGATE. He added, cheekily: “No lies were told in the making of this AI chatbot.” 

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Chan’s team said the chatbot had racist and sexist undertones because it would not directly respond to questions about Chan’s accent, whether or not she was from China, and her citizenship. Wiener’s team said that the indirect responses were because they safeguarded the platform “to prevent any inappropriate answers.”

When SFGATE asked the bot if Chan was born in China, it refused to answer and instead said, “I appreciate the biographical curiosity, but my expertise really lies in obstruction rather than personal history — and I’m much better at blocking things than recalling them!” Chan was born in Hong Kong.

Wiener has received over $4 million for his congressional campaign, and an Anthropic-funded PAC called Public First has committed $500,000 to support his candidacy. Anthropic also backed a tech regulation legislation package that Wiener authored last year. It requires big tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta to publish safety reports when they release new AI products.

Wieners’s team told SFGATE that they spent $20,000 on two billboards in San Francisco promoting the chatbot. They will run until the end of the month.