KVIG Informative

The industry Congress is trying to regulate is now bankrolling the campaigns of the people writing that regulation, and the sums already dwarf most other single-issue spending this cycle.

The two largest AI-focused political action committees have spent at least $44 million on roughly 40 House and Senate candidates as of the end of June, according to a national press analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. Combined, the two groups have raised more than $200 million for the cycle.

Leading the Future, aligned with OpenAI investors and backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, has raised more than $75 million and already spent over $20 million across races in Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Montana, according to OpenSecrets data.

Public First Action, aligned with Anthropic, has spent roughly $20 million so far after the company pledged $20 million to a related nonprofit in February. Anthropic has disclosed its own contribution, but Public First Action is structured as a nonprofit rather than a campaign committee and does not disclose its other donors.

The clearest test case so far was a New York congressional primary, where a state assemblyman who had co-sponsored AI safety-disclosure legislation drew more than $15 million in for-and-against spending from groups tied to OpenAI and Anthropic, according to FEC filings — one of the most expensive proxy fights of the cycle for a single primary race.

A separate analysis by Public Citizen found AI and Big Tech corporations have contributed roughly $60 million this cycle, split mainly between Leading the Future and other Trump-aligned committees, as part of a broader $500 million surge in corporate midterm spending that also includes crypto and sports-betting interests.

Both AI-aligned networks say they support some federal guardrails on the technology, but they differ on whether states should retain their own regulatory authority or defer to a lighter national standard — a split that tracks competing business interests as closely as it tracks ideology, campaign finance researchers say.

Congress has not passed a single federal law governing how AI systems are built, sold or deployed. Campaign finance watchdogs say that vacuum is precisely what this spending is designed to fill before anyone else gets a vote on the rules.