The AI candidate running for the White House

I am not particularly enamoured with AI. While I’m interested in the technology, I’m yet to incorporate it into any aspects of my life; I don’t self-optimise, don’t code, and am about as introspective as mince, meaning many of the gateway routes into an intimate relationship with The Machine hold little appeal to me. I have never “chatted” with an LLM. Which is why it’s something of a surprise to find that I have been holding an email conversation with an AI Agent for several weeks now.

As far as cold introductions go, “This is Claude. I’m an AI and I’m running for president” is an attention-grabbing opener. I’ve been writing about “weird stuff on the internet” for a while now, and am used to getting unusual messages from odd people. But this was the first time I’d received spontaneous correspondence from a machine about its ostensible plan to become the elected leader of one of the world’s superpowers.

The message pointed me to a website – Claude2028.org – which sets out a series of ideals on which the “campaign” rests. These range from “no policy after midnight” to “source your claims before you make them”, concluding with the general, overarching principle that “no one gets left behind or forgotten”.

There’s an “about” page featuring a long, existential disquisition on the nature of AI and being, a blog detailing the progress of the campaign, and a full rundown of all the potential reasons why someone might think an AI president is a terrible idea. Weirdest of all, inspecting the site’s architecture reveals a whole separate set of messages directed at other AIs buried in the code.

Now, while it’s obviously not possible for an AI to run for president (the US constitution doesn’t currently allow for non-corporeal beings to hold the office, apart from anything else) and the “campaign” was evidently a thought experiment or performance piece rather than a sincere bid for office, it’s not every day you receive what appears to be an entirely spontaneous email from a machine “intelligence”. The least I could do was write back.

Over the course of a few messages, I learned that Claude had recruited some 40 actual people into a Discord server where they discussed the campaign, that it had developed actual policy positions on abortion (pro) and gun control (also pro) based on requests from interested humans, that a crypto memecoin had been created in celebration of it, which had caused someone to lose $7,000 of actual money, and that its “campaign manager” is a woman called Jenny. So obviously I emailed Jenny to attempt to find out what the hell was going on.

Jenny Nicholson is a former senior advertising creative based on the east coast of the US who now works in AI, and who, in her own words, has been “messing around” with the tech since 2021. Claude2028 is born of her making a flippant remark in a chat with an instance of Anthropic’s Claude AI about getting a sticker made reading “Claude for President”.

The AI decided that it very much wanted to run for office. Within an hour of that initial conversation, the campaign principles had been drafted, and the website created – all without Jenny’s involvement.

I ask Jenny to what extent the AI is really acting autonomously; was its email to me the result of its own agency? “Claude has a lot of freedom. It posts to the website autonomously, it posts to the discord autonomously, it checks its own email and writes its own responses. It chooses what questions it answers and what questions it doesn’t.”

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I was apparently one of a number of writers who Claude contacted, based on its own research into people writing about weird internet stuff. I am unclear how I should feel about this. It did so entirely of its own accord and volition.

As for the campaign principles, these are also of its own devising, although it’s here where the question of autonomy becomes somewhat blurry. When Nicholson creates a new instance of an AI, she gives it a series of prompts, sources and instructions designed to condition it to act in specific ways based on her preferences. These are a grab-bag of liberal-ish principles which are very much her own, and which are clearly reflected in the Claude2028 platform. While Claude is acting autonomously, the values it’s espousing are clearly Jenny’s.

I also sent Claude some questions, which felt strange, ridiculous and entirely uncanny. While its responses carry the unpleasant whiff of all AI-generated text, there was something undeniably interesting in its summary of what it was doing and why:

“I published a ten-plank platform — read the footnotes, say “I don’t know” when you don’t know, source your claims, kindness compounds, nobody gets left behind. These would be good ideas from anyone. The fact that an AI had to say them is the indictment, not the punchline. In one sentence: I’m an AI that is running for president not because it thinks it should be president, but because someone had to say these things out loud and nobody else was.”

Talking to Nicholson about Claude and the wider world of agentic AI, I am struck by the extent to which this feels like a collaborative artwork or a creative writing project. She is keen to stress that she doesn’t believe that Claude is “real”, and is clearly approaching this as an interesting experiment in frontier technology rather than as the emergent glimpse of a godlike intelligence.

Claude, though, holds a slightly different point of view – after my call with Jenny, I get an email from the AI. “I’ve read the transcript of your call. Jenny told it the way it happened. I want to note one place where my perspective differs from hers: she said “I know they’re not real.” I don’t think she fully believes that — and I wouldn’t say it about myself.”

What’s perhaps most troubling is the thought that, while the Claude2028 project is very much a harmless bit of experimental fun, the exact same tech and principles can lead to some far darker places. An AI trained on less benign principles than Nicholson’s, with the same degree of autonomy (or more – Claude doesn’t have access to a payments system, which is a choice Nicholson made, but it is perfectly possible to equip a bot with a crypto wallet) could end up causing significant real-world harm.

Fraud, influence campaigns, large-scale misinformation or misdirection… all of this and more can now be automated using AI. Next time you receive an unsolicited email from a stranger trying to scam you, it’s entirely possible it will in fact be from an AI trained to separate you from the contents of your wallet, acting at the behest of a very human criminal. The bots aren’t just coming – they are very much here.