# I Donated to Sherrod Brown via ChatGPT
Matt Hodges
2025-08-20

Last month OpenAI announced [ChatGPT
Agent](https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-agent/) which, among
many other things, acts like rubbing LLM onto
[Selenium](https://www.selenium.dev/). Since the announcement, I wanted
to try making a political donation right there in the chat without
building any of my own API or MCP or custom agentic operator weirdware.

It mostly worked:

![A screenshot of ChatGPT in Agent Mode navigating to Sherrod Brown’s
ActBlue page to make a \$50 donation at my
request](./chatgpt-sherrod-brown-donation.png)

It Bing’d for Sherrod Brown’s website, waited for the page to load,
found the donation button for \$50, clicked it, navigated through the
credit card flow, saw that there was a form that needed more information
about me, and handed control back to me to complete the task. Here’s
what that looked like:

![](chatgpt-sherrod-brown-donation.mp4)

I felt a little hesitant typing my credit card info into ChatGPT’s
little VNC iframe, so I set up a temporary virtual card (a free service
offered by my credit card provider) that auto-expired after a single
charge.

This flow is exactly what I expected, but it likely can be automated
further. OpenAI claims that [the agent holds on to cookies across
sessions](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11752874-chatgpt-agent#h_d9ad0b50af),
so I imagine that if I had previously authenticated to ActBlue in a
chat, and had [ActBlue
Express](https://support.actblue.com/donors/help/actblue-express-accounts/),
the automated session would have just charged the card without my
intervention. I didn’t try it.

All the standard “what about…” apply here: How do I know the agent found
the proper donation form? How do I know it didn’t set up recurring
donations? How do I know it selected \$50 and not \$500? How do I know I
didn’t end up on a malicious site prompt-injecting me to donate to Jon
Husted instead? Yes, all the things. In this case, I know because the
agent handed control back to me and I checked. But a more-automated flow
might not have given me that opportunity.

A lot of the discourse around AI and LLMs tends to leave out the idea
that all of this is a UX paradigm shift. I’m eager to see how these
tools mature and how political campaigns can innovate voter contact.