Meta's 'Forge the Future' PAC Funds Florida Legislative Leaders Who Killed AI Bill of Rights, Weakened Data Center Rules

Meta established “Forge the Future Project,” a Florida political action committee funding advertisements and direct contributions to Republican legislative candidates aligned with its AI and data-center interests, according to reporting by Florida legislative-beat journalist Jason Garcia. Meta contributed $25,000 to future Senate President Jim Boyd, $10,000 each to future Senate Presidents Jay Trumbull and Tom Leek, and $10,000 each to future House Speakers Jennifer Canady and Mike Redondo — all incumbents who had previously killed a proposed “AI bill of rights” penalizing AI companies for unrestricted child chatbot access, and who weakened data-center regulations by removing NDA disclosure requirements. Meta is spending $65 million or more nationally through similar Forge the Future committees in state legislative races.

This is the electoral-capture layer underneath the tax-exemption and grid-cost-shift capture already documented in the data-center fiscal-capture pattern (2026-06-11–data-center-fiscal-capture-tax-exemptions-state-budgets-electoral-salience) — rather than buying exemptions after the fact, Meta is buying the legislators who write them, in the same states facing local resident resistance to data-center abatements (2026-07-07–bell-county-tx-residents-demand-end-meta-data-center-abatements). It also extends the AI-industry super-PAC pattern already tracked at the federal and multistate level (2026-03-12–ai-industry-super-pacs-flood-2026-midterms, 2026-02-27–ai-super-pac-leading-the-future-targets-pro-regulation-midterms) down to the state-legislative-leadership level, where the payoff is concrete: a killed child-safety bill and a removed disclosure requirement, not just a blocked future regulation.