On one side, you have those who see most AI safety regulations as a barrier to innovation. Pushing that narrative forward in Washington DC is “Leading the Future,” a super PAC backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and AI search engine company Perplexity.
Leading the Future launched in August with the mission of spending more than $100 million to ensure the victory of anti-AI/anti-regulation candidates in the 2026 midterm elections, with its first official target being New York State Assemblyman Alex Borsch, who is running for Congress. Bors co-sponsored the RAISE Act, a state-level AI safety law that is still awaiting Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature.
Bors isn’t the only AI to find a spot in Congress; There are several others, including California State Senator Scott Wiener, who led the first AI safety bill of its kind, which was signed into law by California Governor Gavin Newsom in October.
The super PAC also launched an advocacy arm called Build American AI, which on Monday announced a $10 million campaign to push for a pro-AI federal legislative framework that would eliminate strict state-level laws and resolutions.
Now a new group is forming in response to Leading the Future, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
According to the Times, AI safety activists, donors associated with the effective altruism movement, and employees at all ranks of Anthropic have been talking for some time about how to take on Leading the Future.
A new network of super PACs led by former Democratic Congressman Brad Carson of Oklahoma is reportedly planning to raise nearly $50 million to support bipartisan pro-deregulation candidates in the 2026 midterm elections.
Carson told the Times that the network eventually wants to match the $100 million raised by Leading the Future. The new network is so focused on fighting Andreessen-backed super PACs that they have reportedly joked about calling themselves “z16a”, as in the previous spelling of Andreessen Horowitz’s surname as “a16z”.
While Anthropic has not yet committed to supporting any particular group, the report claims that some of the new advocacy group’s funding will likely come from Anthropic executives and employees, though not from the corporation itself.
Carson told the Times that he is talking to wealthy donors from across the industry, including Anthropic and OpenAI, which is notable considering that OpenAI Chairman Brockman is one of the leading backers of Future.
Security is central to Anthropic’s self-proclaimed mission. Co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei are both former OpenAI employees who left the ChatGPT-creator to create a more security-focused AI company.
Years later, OpenAI is now facing intense backlash and some legal trouble following allegations that the company ignored security measures for its chatbots. At the center of the backlash is the problem of sycophancy of some ChatGPAT models, which has reportedly caused serious and sometimes fatal mental health episodes in some users. Meanwhile, Anthropic has been evaluating its chatbots’ propensity toward sycophancy for years.
Anthropic officials have long called for the industry to be regulated lightly to ensure a safe AI development approach. He was the only major early supporter of AI regulation in California, and the only AI veteran to maintain some degree of distance from the Trump administration, while the rest of the industry actually cultivated close ties with the White House.
Critics of Anthropic’s approach typically call it “doomism” and view arguments for regulation as inauthentic attempts to ensure that the regulatory environment is inhospitable to new AI companies.
The AI industry is no stranger to lobbying, but the size of its influence efforts and the scrutiny it faces is growing significantly.
One of the many points to take away from the outcome of the 2024 elections was that pouring incredible amounts of money into influencing public opinion and swaying democratic elections actually works very well. The crypto industry, through its leading super PAC (once again Andreessen Horowitz-backed) Fairshake, spent $135 million to ensure a pro-crypto sweep of local elections and guarantee the election of the self-proclaimed “first pro-crypto President” of the United States. Since then, crypto bros have been rewarded with favorable regulations and even presidential pardons.
It seems that both sides of the controversy have been taken seriously by the AI industry, and they are ready to move forward.
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