A massive pile of money aimed at stopping AI regulation was already set to reshape U.S. electoral politics in the coming cycle, and now a massive pile of money aimed at spurring AI regulation is coming to cancel it out. None of this is business as usual, and it’s going to get weird.
According to the New York Times, a brand new 501(c)(4) group has just been born to counter pro-AI PAC money with anti-AI PAC money, and the plan, according to the Times’ sources, is to raise $50 million. This entity calls itself Public First, and it’s about to start funneling money from undisclosed donors into a Democratic anti-AI super PAC called Jobs and Democracy PAC, and a Republican twin called Defending Our Values PAC.
Personalities that seem to be involved in Public First, according to the Times, are billionaire Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
A “PAC” or “political action committee” raises legally-limited contributions to influence election outcomes. A super PAC is an independent PAC that is allowed to raise unlimited money because it doesn’t coordinate directly with campaigns. So super PACs are known for running negative ads smearing the candidates they’re against, which doesn’t require coordination in order to benefit friendly candidates.
According to The New York Times, which learned about these new PACs from anonymous sources, all this is not so-secretly a response to the pro-AI PAC Leading the Future. Leading the future, which had $100 million banked when news of its existence broke earlier this month, is backed by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Andreesseen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, and Joe Lonsdale a co-founder of Palantir. The intention with Leading the Future is to back candidates who oppose AI regulation.
The amounts of money these groups are throwing around are intense, and way beyond normal spending levels for businesses and “special interests” in the U.S. For reference, the United Auto Worker’s PAC, which is considered pretty influential, raised $15,259,386 for the 2024 election cycle according to OpenSecrets. The oil and gas industry, meanwhile, gave $13,895,000 to super PACs for that same cycle, according to Sludge.
The type of economic power these AI PACs are achieving (or hoping to achieve) is closer in scale to President Trump’s super PAC, which secured $177 million by August of this year, mostly from crypto donors, according to the New York Times. Crypto’s Fairshake super PAC similarly has $140 million, placing it right alongside AI, molding politics anew for the weird tech era.
For an example of what AI PAC money looks like in action, look at its hostility earlier this month toward obscure New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, who is running for a House seat. Bores is the chief sponsor of a piece of New York legislation requiring AI companies to work on preventing “critical harms” from AI models, but he suddenly found himself and his bill becoming the target of billionaires on the other side of the country in California. Leading the Future vowed to spend millions keeping this one random guy out of Congress.
Bores told the San Francisco Examiner he was under fire from “a specific, small part of Silicon Valley that has an extreme minority [viewpoint] that there should be no regulation of AI whatsoever,” and noted that “the fact that they are being so straightforward about that is something I’m thankful for.” Among Politicos, Bores is famous now.
This kind of weirdness is about to accelerate. Among the factions the Times says are helping dream up Public First up are “allied donors who are loosely tied to the effective altruism movement.”
Effective altruism is not on the map politically. EA is a tweaked form of utilitarianism, aimed at amassing the greatest possible amount of money, and then turning around and using it to try and mitigate the most possible harms. A list of the movement’s most prominent members would include imprisoned crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, and deeply odd philosophers like Peter Singer and Nick Bostrom.
These groups, in short, aren’t tidily partisan. The pro-AI side, Leading the Future, so far only seems to have irritated the Trump Administration, even though the Republican Party is the more obvious fit for its agenda. Meanwhile, Public First, with its separate Democratic and Republican sides is bound to support candidates with deeply contradictory agendas before long.
Many will find the lack of clear partisanship to be a relief, but rather than being a bipartisan dream, two politically incoherent funding titans are materializing, and they—alongside crypto—are about to try and drown out the rest of the political picture next year.
Elections in the U.S. are always painful slogs. What’s coming could be something worse: a high-stakes public competition between anonymous factions, seemingly made up largely of billionaires, using AI as a pretext to have a food fight all over what’s left of the American political process. I can’t wait.
