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On March 18, 2026, results from the Illinois primary elections provided the first major test of AI industry super PAC spending in the 2026 midterm cycle, and the results were decidedly mixed. "Think Big," the super PAC funded by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Andreessen Horowitz's Marc Andreessen, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, spent more than $2.5 million across several Illinois races. Its preferred candidate Jonathan Bean won the Republican primary in Illinois's 8th Congressional District, but Jesse Jackson Jr.'s attempted political comeback in Illinois's 2nd Congressional District ended in defeat despite significant outside spending.
Anthropic-backed "Jobs and Democracy PAC," which positioned itself as a counter to the industry's anti-regulation spending, deployed approximately $1 million in Illinois races, primarily targeting Jackson's candidacy. The PAC framed its spending as supporting candidates who favored AI safety guardrails and opposed the concentration of AI policy influence among a small number of tech billionaires. The dueling PACs offered a preview of what promised to be an expensive and ideologically fractured AI spending war across the remaining 2026 primary calendar.
Fortune's post-election analysis concluded that AI and cryptocurrency interests had collectively spent roughly $20 million on Illinois primary races and "mostly lost," suggesting that tech industry money was not translating into electoral influence as efficiently as its backers had hoped. The mixed results prompted debate within the AI industry about whether the super PAC strategy — which relied on advertising about issues unrelated to AI to elect sympathetic candidates — was fundamentally flawed, or whether the approach simply needed refinement before higher-stakes general election contests. WBEZ reported that Illinois voters surveyed at polling places were largely unaware of the AI industry's role in funding the advertisements they had seen, raising questions about the transparency of the spending strategy.