Silicon Valley just discovered that Congress writes the rules for their trillion-dollar future, and they're spending accordingly.
The Summary
- AI companies and executives have dumped $65 million into super PACs ahead of 2026 midterms, with tens of millions more in reserve and undisclosed dark money still hidden
- OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Anthropic, and Meta are backing networks of outside groups to shape Congress and state legislatures
- The spending spike comes as the Trump White House slowed frontier model releases and states like New York enact data center moratoriums
The Signal
The AI industry is learning what Big Tech learned a decade ago: if you don't write the rules, someone else will. Leading the Future, backed by OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, leads a pack of super PACs that have already burned through $65 million. That's more than the crypto industry spent in the entire 2022 cycle.
The timing isn't coincidental. The Trump administration, despite its general AI-friendly posture, recently slowed releases of frontier models from both Anthropic and OpenAI. Translation: even a sympathetic White House will regulate when it feels like it. The industry is hedging against the next Congress being less sympathetic.
"The AI industry has become deeply unpopular even as more people use more advanced models than ever before."
Here's the tension that's driving the spending: usage is exploding while sentiment is cratering. New York Governor Kathy Hochul just signed a data center moratorium into law. Other states are watching. If you're Anthropic or Meta, you're looking at a future where you can't build the infrastructure to train your models because local governments decided server farms are the new coal plants.
The $65 million is just what's been disclosed. Dark money groups in this space don't have to report regularly, which means the real number could be double or triple that. The crypto industry pioneered this playbook in 2022 and 2024, spending heavily through Fairshake and similar PACs. Now AI is running the same play, but with deeper pockets and more immediate regulatory threats.
Key wildcards the industry is tracking:
- What Congress does about China-based open weight models like Moonshot AI's Kimi K3
- Whether more states follow New York's data center moratorium
- How the next Congress approaches compute export controls and chip restrictions
The irony: the industry that promises to automate everything still needs humans to vote the right way. These super PACs aren't buying ads about AI safety or innovation. They're buying the ability to keep training models without asking permission from fifty different state legislatures.
The Implication
Watch where the money goes in swing districts with data centers or chip fabs. That's where the real battle is. If you're building in this space, understand that your regulatory environment is being shaped right now by people who aren't talking about it in press releases.
The AI industry just went from "move fast and break things" to "move fast and buy things." The things they're buying are senators, representatives, and state legislators who will let them keep building without local communities having veto power over their infrastructure.