Senators use ‘special’ version of ChatGPT, Sen. John Kennedy reveals

Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) sounded off on how senators use artificial intelligence on Tuesday, saying there is a version of ChatGPT specifically for the upper chamber.“The Senate has a version of Chat[GPT]. It’s a special Senate version of ChatGPT,” Kennedy told TMZ DC on Monday.Kennedy told the outlet that upper chamber employees must use the Senate version from OpenAI and cannot use other chatbots on government laptops and devices. “They have one of their own: It’s a ChatGPT Enterprise version that they’ve checked out and made sure that it’ll work,” Kennedy said.According to NPR, Senate staff are granted access to only three chatbot models: Microsoft Copilot Chat, Gemini Chat for Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, and OpenAI ChatGPT Enterprise. ChatGPT Enterprise is the OpenAI model that is typically marketed at businesses.In August 2025, the General Services Administration partnered with OpenAI to give federal agencies access to ChatGPT Enterprise for a discounted $1 annual rate per agency.Kennedy told the outlet that he had used the Senate’s ChatGPT model earlier to do research of his own.The Louisiana senator’s riffing on chatbot technologies comes as lawmakers have amped up their debates on how to, and how much to, regulate frontier AI models, given warnings from AI industry leaders.Multiple industry CEOs, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, have called on lawmakers to implement more guardrails on the most advanced AI technologies, as industry workers warn of doomsday outcomes with unregulated development.THE FOLKSY SENATE REPUBLICAN IN HOT DEMAND ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAILAs part of Congress’s mixed attempts to answer the regulatory calls, Kennedy backed an AI “kill switch” bill to put the emergency brakes on the chatbot systems, though the Senate blocked his effort.The Washington Examiner has reached out to OpenAI for comment.