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As of late February 2026, the AI industry's electoral intervention in the 2026 midterm elections had reached a scale comparable to the cryptocurrency industry's 2024 campaign spending. The super PAC Leading the Future—backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and AI search startup Perplexity—had raised $125 million in commitments with $70 million in cash on hand, positioning it as the dominant pro-AI electoral force in the country.
The stated mission of Leading the Future was to elect Democratic and Republican candidates who favor AI-friendly policies while targeting candidates who call for stricter AI regulations. The group framed its mission around the race against China to develop advanced AI systems, arguing that regulatory constraints would cost the United States strategic advantage. Critically, ads funded by the AI industry flooding the 2026 election rarely mentioned AI policy directly—they ran on kitchen-table economic issues and partisan themes while the underlying agenda was deregulation of the AI sector.
The super PAC's targeting strategy became concrete in at least two congressional races, including an active effort against Alex Bores, a Democratic state assemblymember from New York who is a congressional candidate and former Palantir engineer who had successfully pushed the RAISE Act, one of the first state-level AI safety laws. Bores had proposed federal legislation creating safety regulations for AI development, chatbots, and data centers—positioning him as the kind of candidate Leading the Future was organized to defeat. Meta separately formed its own super PACs, spending at least $65 million to back pro-AI candidates in California and other states.
Countermovements had also organized. Former U.S. Representatives Chris Stewart (R-UT) and Brad Carson (D-OK) formed two pro-regulation super PACs to elect candidates supporting stricter AI oversight. Anthropic had funded Public First, a group that had raised at least $20 million and was backing candidates in favor of AI safety legislation—including Bores, directly placing Anthropic in electoral competition with its industry rivals on opposing sides of the regulatory question, even as Anthropic itself faced a government blacklist for maintaining safety standards.
The AI super PAC infrastructure represented the emergence of a new oligarchic pattern: technology executives who had enriched themselves under existing regulatory frameworks were now deploying that wealth to elect legislators who would block safety rules that might constrain their further enrichment, using the China competition framing to make deregulation appear patriotic rather than self-interested.