The AI industry has found a new battleground: your local congressional race. Two mega-PACs - one backed by OpenAI, the other by Anthropic - are pouring $175 million into the 2026 midterms. But if you’ve seen their ads, you’d never know it was about AI at all.
The Invisible Issue
Leading the Future, a super PAC co-founded by OpenAI President Greg Brockman and bankrolled by Andreessen Horowitz, has committed $125 million to this election cycle. Public First, backed by $20 million from Anthropic, is spending to counter them. Together they’re flooding airwaves in competitive districts from New York to North Carolina.
The ads talk about immigration. They talk about healthcare. They talk about Trump. They talk about everything except artificial intelligence.
“We know AI isn’t the first thing on every voter’s mind when they go to the polls,” Brad Carson, Public First’s founder and a former Democratic congressman, told NBC News.
Translation: voters might not like what the AI industry actually wants.
Follow the Money
Leading the Future operates through two affiliated groups: Think Big for Democrats, American Mission for Republicans. The structure lets Silicon Valley money flow to both parties simultaneously.
The donor list reads like a who’s-who of AI maximalism. Greg Brockman and his wife Anna each contributed $12.5 million. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of a16z each gave $12.5 million. Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale is a major backer. Perplexity, the AI search company, chipped in. The PAC ended 2025 with $70 million cash on hand.
Public First’s roster is smaller but pointed: Anthropic’s $20 million buys them a seat at the table. Carson says they also have something else: “Which of these sides would you rather have? We have $50 million and 85% of the public sentiment. They have $100 million and 15% of the public opinion.”
Ground Zero: New York’s 12th District
The most expensive battle is unfolding in Manhattan, where Jerry Nadler’s retirement opened up New York’s 12th Congressional District. The target: Alex Bores, a state assemblyman running for the seat.
Bores is an unusual candidate. He’s a Cornell computer science grad, Georgia Tech master’s holder, and former Palantir engineer who left in 2019 over contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He later won election to the state assembly and authored the RAISE Act, New York’s AI safety law requiring labs making over $500 million in revenue to maintain public safety plans and report catastrophic incidents.
That bill made him a target.
Think Big has spent over $1.5 million on ads opposing Bores. The ads don’t mention AI. They attack him on other issues while positioning establishment alternatives. Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First’s Democratic arm, is spending $450,000 defending him.
Joe Lonsdale, Bores’s former employer at Palantir, is now funding ads against him. The irony is lost on no one.
Where Else the Money’s Going
The spending spans multiple districts:
Illinois: Think Big has dropped $1 million each supporting Jesse Jackson Jr. and Melissa Bean in comeback bids. Neither race has obvious AI implications.
North Carolina: Public First spent $1.6 million backing Representative Valerie Foushee’s reelection in the Research Triangle - home to major tech employers.
Texas and North Carolina: American Mission, Leading the Future’s Republican arm, invested $500,000 each in candidates Laurie Buckhout and Chris Gober.
What They’re Actually Fighting Over
Strip away the campaign rhetoric and the battle comes down to one question: who gets to regulate AI, and how much?
Leading the Future’s stated position is a “clear, consistent national framework that will help us to remain a leader in AI innovation and win the race against China.” In practice, this means preempting state laws like Bores’s RAISE Act with weaker federal standards - or no standards at all.
Public First wants stronger safety requirements. Their Anthropic backing makes sense: the company has positioned itself as the safety-focused alternative to OpenAI, and tighter regulations could disadvantage competitors less focused on responsible AI development.
Both sides know that whoever wins in November 2026 will shape AI policy for years. Control of the House hangs in the balance, and with it, committee chairs who’ll write the rules.
The Crypto Playbook
This isn’t Silicon Valley’s first foray into super PAC politics. The crypto industry pioneered the approach in 2024, spending over $100 million through Fairshake and affiliated PACs to elect crypto-friendly candidates.
That effort worked. Crypto’s candidates won. And the industry got exactly the regulatory environment it wanted.
AI is following the same playbook, with bigger money. Leading the Future alone has more capital than all crypto PACs combined had in 2024.
The key lesson from crypto: you don’t have to talk about your industry in the ads. You just need to elect people who’ll vote the right way when bills come up.
The $175 Million Bet
The AI industry is betting that $175 million can buy the regulatory outcome it wants. They’re probably right - at least in the short term.
But the strategy has a flaw. By hiding the AI issue from voters, both sides are admitting that their actual positions aren’t popular. Leading the Future won’t say “we want less AI regulation” in a TV ad because focus groups would hate it. Public First won’t say “we want to slow down AI development” because that sounds anti-progress.
So they run ads about immigration and healthcare, hoping voters won’t connect the dots between their campaign contributions and their congressional votes.
Whether voters catch on is the $175 million question.