Anthropic and OpenAI take their beef to the midterm elections

The AI industry's biggest rivalry has moved out of the lab and into the voting booth. Anthropic and OpenAI are now fighting each other through super PACs, funneling millions of dollars into political campaigns not just to influence policy but to attack each other's corporate interests through the electoral process. It is a development that should alarm anyone who cares about either democracy or technology regulation, and probably both.

The Battle Lines

On one side is Leading the Future, a million pro-AI super PAC funded by Palantir's Joe Lonsdale, Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI's Greg Brockman. On the other is Public First Action, a bipartisan super PAC network that received million from Anthropic. These are not organizations focused on broad AI policy. They are weapons in a corporate war being fought through campaign finance.

The focal point of the current skirmish is New York's congressional race, where Democrat Alex Bores is running a campaign that leans heavily on AI regulation. Bores, who co-authored New York's RAISE Act on AI safety, has become the proxy through which these companies are fighting. Public First Action backs Bores. Leading the Future opposes him. The candidate has become almost incidental to the corporate rivalry playing out around him.

In a telling escalation, Bores challenged Leading the Future to an in-person debate, offering to let them pick the moderator and their own representative. The super PAC declined to comment. The invitation was a publicity stunt, but it revealed something important: the AI industry's political spending has become so visible that candidates can use it as a campaign issue itself.

How Corporate Rivalry Became Electoral Strategy

The legal architecture enabling this is the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which allows corporations and wealthy donors to contribute unlimited sums to political advocacy groups. Super PACs are prohibited from coordinating directly with candidates, but that wall has always been porous, and in this case it barely matters because the real coordination is between the companies and the super PACs that share their interests.

What makes this situation unusual is that the super PACs are not just supporting candidates who favor their preferred regulatory framework. They are being used as vehicles to damage rival companies' political positions. Leading the Future is now widely perceived as an OpenAI vehicle rather than a general industry group. Public First Action is synonymous with Anthropic and the AI safety perspective. The candidates are almost an afterthought.

This is corporate warfare by campaign finance, and it represents a new escalation in the relationship between technology companies and the political system.

The Dark Money Layer

The situation becomes more opaque when you add Innovation Council Action, a pro-AI nonprofit run by Donald Trump's former adviser Taylor Budowich with a million war chest. As a dark money nonprofit, ICA does not have to disclose its donors. It has received the blessing of David Sacks, the former White House special adviser on AI and crypto, and it is focused explicitly on promoting Trump's AI agenda.

This means there are now at least three distinct AI industry political operations: the OpenAI-aligned Leading the Future, the Anthropic-aligned Public First Action, and the Trump-aligned Innovation Council Action, whose funding sources remain hidden. Each represents a different faction with different incentives, and all three are spending tens of millions of dollars to shape the regulatory environment in their favor.

Prediction Markets Enter the Fray

Adding to the regulatory chaos, the Senate Commerce Committee is holding its first hearing on prediction markets, which currently exist in a regulatory gray zone between gambling and financial instruments. Patrick McHenry, the former Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee who left Congress to join Andreessen Horowitz as a crypto lobbyist, will testify on behalf of the Coalition for Prediction Markets. Opposing them is a coalition of gaming companies, futures markets, and traditional sports betting operators who see prediction markets as a direct threat to their business, along with FairPredicts, a watchdog group that has launched a six-figure ad buy timed to the hearing.

What This Means For You

The AI industry is no longer just lobbying regulators. It is spending nine-figure sums to elect or defeat individual members of Congress based on which regulatory framework benefits which company. This is a qualitative shift in how technology companies influence policy, and it means that AI regulation will be shaped less by technical merit or public interest than by which corporate faction wins more elections. For anyone working in AI, investing in AI companies, or simply living in a world increasingly shaped by AI systems, the question is whether the rules governing these technologies will be written by technologists and policymakers or by the super PACs with the biggest budgets. Right now, the money is winning.