Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Exposing OpenAI's Secret Meme Army: A $125M Propaganda Network

Episode Date: June 10, 2026

Exposing The Dark Money Machine Behind AI PropagandaSUPPORT MY WORK: Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at usermag.co     Support my work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz I break down my investigation into a network of pro-AI and anti-AI meme accounts that I found were secretly being run and funded by OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz's big $125M super PAC and dark money group. I reveal how these accounts operated, who is connected to them, why they promoted both sides of the AI debate, and how the organization at the center of the story confirmed key aspects of the reporting after publication.I talk about how a self-described “Meme Lord” named Jason Levin,  founder of Memelord Technologies was hired by the super PAC, Leading the Future, to create and run sock puppet accounts like “DoomersAreDumb” and “Jonathan Doomer” to attack AI critics, mock disabled people, post violent threats, and even pretend to be an anti-AI activist.OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman donated millions to this campaign. OpenAI’s head of strategy follows these meme accounts. And when confronted, Build American AI confirmed it all.Topics covered:AI propaganda and influence campaignsOpenAI and AI policy politicsDark money groups and Super PACsFake activist accountsAI-generated content networksMeme pages and online manipulationPolitical lobbying and artificial intelligenceSocial media influence operationsTech industry power and public opinion#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #TechNews #OpenAI #SiliconValley #MemeCulture #InvestigativeJournalism #InfluenceCampaign #AIDebate #TechPolicy #PowerUser

Have you noticed that so many more memes online these days are talking about AI, whether they're boosting it or making fun of it. It seems like AI is just increasingly becoming part of meme culture. Well, today I published a big story in collaboration with an independent journalist named Tyler Johnson who's been doing great work on holding AI companies accountable. And I want to do something a little different on today's podcast. There's no guest. It's just me.

And I want to tell you about this crazy story that I uncovered about a pro AI super PAC running a network of pro and anti-AI meme accounts. It's actually all so crazy. So last year, this mega-powerful super PAC called Leading the Future launched. Leading the Future is kind of the brainchild of this guy, Chris Lehane, who's open AI's head of policy. He basically modeled it after this previously successful crypto super PAC that he was involved in. And very quickly, this emerged as like the de facto pro AI super PAC.

Leaving the Future has raised over $125 million from people like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the co-founders of Andresen Horowitz, Mark Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz. It's backed by powerful AI companies like perplexity. And one of the biggest funders is Open AI's president, Greg Brockman. So far, Leading the Future has used all of their vast resources from these tech billionaires to attack anyone criticizing AI. They go after prominent AI doomers and politicians. they've attacked Bernie Sanders.

They've also been getting increasingly involved in political races. So they've been funding attack ads against Alex Boris, who's an anti-AI candidate that's running for office in New York. And today it just came out that they're actually putting money in support of Lindsay Graham, because I guess Lindsay Graham is pro-AI. Now, I'm not expecting any sort of evil pro-AI super PAC to be like the most ethical entity in the world. Obviously, all of these super PACs are doing shady things. We have to get money out of American politics.

The whole thing is a mess. But the tactics that leading the future leverages are quite unorthodox, even for a super PAC. They've spun up these shell organizations to pay vendors, tried to obscure their spending in various different ways. They also created a dark money group called Build American AI, which functions as kind of like a subsidiary. And it basically is just a dark money group that's like the dark money side of this mega powerful super pack. If you follow my work, you might have read my big investigation in Wire that came out last month about Build American AI secretly. paying dozens of influencers thousands of dollars to post messaging in support of AI and attack Chinese AI as a threat. That whole campaign blew up in their face when they actually tried to recruit

me into it. I'm not kidding you. The influencer marketer for Build American AI reached out and tried to pay me thousands and thousands of dollars of dark money to participate in this campaign. Obviously, as you guys know, I'm completely independent. So I'll just take this opportunity to, again, say that if you like my work and you like my podcast and you support my report, I'm not supporting whatsoever. Please, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack on usermag. That's usermag.co or support me on Patreon. On my Patreon, I do bonus episodes, a monthly Q&A live stream, and more.

Again, I don't take dark money. I don't have any financial sponsors. I literally am 100% funded by people like you and my followers. So seriously, every dollar makes such difference and ensures that I can continue reporting and doing this work. So anyway, that was the big investigation that I published in Wired last month. Now, when I published that and went to leading the future for comment, and was like, hey, you're doing all this shady influencer marketing.

What the hell is going on? Their spokesperson gave me a statement that kind of made me raise my eyebrows. They responded to my story by saying, quote, the United States has an opportunity to remain the global leader in AI innovation. And we're taking that message to the broadest possible audience through an all of the above communication strategy. Dark money, doomer groups have spent millions spreading misinformation to the American public and we won't let it go unchallenged.

We'll continue to highlight AI's economic benefits. counter false narratives and build the coalition needed to advance a national regulatory framework using every tool at our disposal. So number one, they weren't apologetic at all about the weird dark money influencer campaign. And number two, they're using this kind of inflammatory language saying that they're embracing and all of the above communication strategy or saying that they will use every tool at their disposal. To me, a journalist, I was like, okay, I got to keep my eye on this because if they're doing this and they're doubling down on it, what else are they doing?

So Tyler and I started looking into it. And last July, just 10 days after Build American AI, again, the dark money group tied to leading the future, filed its articles of incorporation in Nevada, a new meme page popped up called Doomers are dumb. Referring, of course, to AI Dumers, which is what they like to call anybody that, I don't know, doesn't want AI to take over our world. At first, it seemed to be this kind of standard meme page. It was like making all these sad, pitiful attempts to go viral, posting this generic content. some of the content even seemed to be automated. And it was posting stuff like gay son or thought daughter or joking about getting cheated on by a wifu. So the account didn't really raise any alarm bells.

But then in October, around the time that Build American AI began publicly campaigning, suddenly this account, Dumers are Dumb, starts pivoting. It's suddenly relentlessly posting pro AI memes. And that account starts sparring with another account called Jonathan Dumer. Now, this Jonathan Dumer account at first also seemed to be a meme page. Like, if you scroll back far enough, you see that it also started just posting kind of like generic engagement bates memes. But around this time, Jonathan Dumer also changed his username and basically came out and proclaimed to be this AI skeptic who quit his job to spread mornings about technology on Twitter. So just to recap, we have the pro AI, Dumer's or Dumb account. And then we have the anti-AI, Jonathan Dumer.

And these accounts are engaging with. each other and both posting either pro or anti-AI memes. But there is one thing that both of these accounts have in common. And that is that they both for some reason love promoting Build American AI, the dark money group tied to leading the future. Doomers Are Dumb directly responded to a Build American AI tweet from the day that it publicly launched. And Dumers Are Dumb was retweeting Build American AIs launch recap. Jonathan Dumer, meanwhile, was also in Build American AI's launch recap. Jonathan Dumer, meanwhile was also in Build American AI's replies. And what's really interesting to me about these accounts is that they're tiny.

Like one has just several hundred followers and I think Jonathan Doomer has a little over a thousand. But these are not major meme accounts. These are kind of like random no name accounts that I think most normal ex users would just look at as like low quality engagement farm type pages. However, these no name meme pages actually have some pretty powerful followers. Jason Kwan Open AI's chief strategy officer. follows both of them. So does Josh Vlasto leading the future's top operative.

Josh Vlasto, mind you, is the former chief of staff for Andrew Cuomo, who runs leading the future and Build American AI. In fact, both of these meme accounts have engaged really heavily with Build American AI and all of the leading the future affiliates, including this guy, Colin McCune, who's Andresen Horowitz's head of government affairs. So I think you guys can probably pick up what I'm putting down, but nothing about this is organic. And as I was reporting out this article, I found out that even though Jonathan Doomer poses as this like staunch anti-AI activist now and pretends that he quit his job to protest AI, if you scroll back and look at the earliest posts from the account, they were actually completely pro-AI. On October 22nd,

right around the time that Build American AI launched, both Jonathan Doomer and Doomers are dumb pivoted from these generic memes to posting about AI. And they were both spreading these pro-AI messages that were aligned with leading the futures messaging. It wasn't until a month later, at the end of November, that Jonathan Dumer changed its handle and began posting negatively about AI. And as I mentioned earlier, this page claims to be run by this guy who says that he had a 20-year career in engineering and he became really worried about AI. So he quit his job literally over AI and to warn about its dangers. And even today, if you go to this Jonathan Dumer account, it's espousing like extreme opposition to AI technology. But if you actually read the words

that Jonathan Dumer is posting, you might notice it seems like they're also written by AI, actually, we use this tool, Pam Graham, to run analysis on the content produced by Jonathan Doomer and found that it's overwhelmingly AI generated content. So anyway, obviously, this Jonathan Doomer guy is probably not a person at all. And clearly, somebody affiliated with leading the future and build American AI is either running or funding both of these meme accounts. So we started digging even further. And it seems like the person behind both of these meme accounts who's acting as a proxy for this dark money group at SuperPack is this guy, Jason Levin. Jason Levin runs a company called Memlord Technologies,

and he appears to be running all these leading the future affiliated sock puppet accounts. Jason Levin initially gained fame last year after he worked briefly for Andrew Cuomo as his right-wing meme lord. Mind you, again, Josh Vlasto, the head of leading the future, was Cuomo's former chief of staff. Anyway, now Levin does this like freelance digital marketing stuff and he runs meme lord technologies, which is a platform that gives you access to trending meme templates and AI content creation tools. So it seems pretty clear that Jason Levin is set up these accounts as proxy meme pages for leading the future. Much of the early engagement on Doomers are dumb and

Jonathan Doomer came from other meme lord affiliated Twitter users. And Jason Levin actually engaged with both accounts on the first day that they began posting and he's continued to engage substantially since then. Other meme lord affiliated meme accounts have also played a role in shaping the conversation around AI and boosting these dumer and anti-dumer focused pages, including pages like chat GPT lunatics, LinkedIn lunatic, and tech bro memes. And while leading the future has tried to launder its image and seem like a little bit more responsible to people in Washington, this meme account is kind of functioning as it's attack dog. It's going around and harassing a lot of real people and organizations that are opposed to AI.

It's also just posting a lot of highly offensive and bigoted content to promote its pro-AI agenda. For instance, one post uses videos of real people with Down syndrome to attack the protest group Stop AI. Other targets of the account are lawmakers that leading the future has beef with, like Bernie Sanders and Alex Boris. They also frequently attack Anthropic

and Dario, the co-founder of Anthropic, who leading the future as a proxy of open AI has huge beef with. The Dumers Are Dumb account has made posts mocking disabled people, disparaging the appearance, of real women and just generally posting a lot of lewd and offensive content like kermit the frog masturbating or references to deep fakes targeting intimate partners other posts from the account casually joke about swallowing semen cannibalism and massad and i've reported so much on bad influence campaigns

i'm not even that shocked that a maniacal pro-a-i dark money group is paying for this like inflammatory meme marketing but i almost think the jonathan dumer account is even more insidious than doomers are dumb because the Jonathan Dumer account is effectively purporting to be an anti-AI activist. But it's like a parody of an AI activist. And the posts from it, it uses this inflammatory language that just allows people that are pro-AI to really easily like quote tweet it and just be like, look at how crazy the anti-AI people are. Like, look at how insane they are. Look at how inflammatory their rhetoric is.

And they've even used this Jonathan Dumer account to effectively issue threats on Sam Altman's life. Post from the page compares Sam Altman to a caterpillar. that murders insects and stitches their dismembered body parts onto its back as armor. Various other posts from the account calls supporters of AI assimilated and organic drones. And Jonathan Dumer claims that we're less than 12 months away from an AI-induced apocalypse. They also post all of this weird pro-China stuff, which to me is like such a big tell. Because all these pro-AI right-wing people are trying to paint anti-Data Center activists and anti-AI activists as tools of China.

And they love to falsely claim that like the anti-AI. data center movement in America is a sciop from China. Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank who's building that massive data center project in Utah recently made this claim. He was like saying that all these activists are just paid by Beijing and, you know, we're China operatives. And nobody that's actually engaged in fighting data centers or AI is a tool of China. Like actually none of us even think about China.

China is not on anyone's radar. Like no one cares other than like being like, yeah, I'm sure things are better in China. Who cares? So I think the fact that this fake anti-AI activist is kind of repeating these approach. China messages is a giveaway that it's fake. And some of the things that this Jonathan Dumer account has been posting are things like, quote, they say if we slow down, China will win the AI arms race. I say, let them.

China has a much better quality of life than the U.S. China should be the world leader. And it's like, listen, do a lot of people on the left, I think glaze China a little bit too much? Sure. But like, that's like cop language. Like that's like such a mockery of like how actual activists talk that there's just no way that any of this is real.

So anyway, to backtrack what seems to be. happening is the super pro-a-I super PAC that's a proxy for andresen horowitz open AI, etc. And their affiliated dark money group Build American AI has potentially contracted this meme lord technology's Jason Levin guy to run this network of sock puppet accounts online that are posting pro and anti-AI memes. But both of those pro and anti-AI memes feed leaving the future's messaging and help shape public opinion around AI. And this is really insidious. Now, because of the way our broken political system works. If leading the future is directly paying for this, meme lord would not appear as a vendor in its FEC filings. This type of expenditure could be

easily filtered through the dark money group like Build American AI, or they could just be getting paid through one of leading the future as many shell vendors. But overall, after working on this reporting for weeks and weeks, the links between these meme accounts and the super pack are just too overwhelming to be happenstance. And I think the fact that Open AIs head of strategy, Andresen Horowitz's head of public affairs, and all of these people that directly work for or affiliated with, build American AI and leading the future, follow and engage with these accounts, again, that in some cases have just like hundreds of followers, is just a dead giveaway that these are just not random meme accounts. These are meme accounts dedicated to boosting

the superpox messaging online. Jamie Cohen, who's an associate professor of media studies at Queens College, told me, quote, there's not a gray area here. Without clear disclosure about funding and whose messaging is being promoted, the public is left in the dark, and these messages become mainstream. And I think he's totally right, because AI technology is already radically upending our information ecosystem. The public is swimming in a sea of false information and undisclosed marketing. Politicians, corporate lobbyists, and bad actors are running 24-7 influence campaigns, while influencers and meme account admins are selling off access to their platforms to the highest bidder. All of this, as I've written extensively, is extremely.

corrosive to democracy. And while leading the future attempts to appear all professional when they go to Washington, D.C. and meet with people on the Hill. And they promote this like positive vision of AI where we have this like pro innovation future, et cetera, et cetera. I think that it's willingness to engage in these anonymous influence campaigns and deceptive online practices and offensive memes actually tell a very different story about what that organization is really about. Shortly after my story went live, By the way, Build American AI actually publicly responded and confirmed everything that we reported. They quote tweeted my co-writer Tyler Johnson's post about our story and said, appreciate the feedback.

These are parody meme accounts run by an outside vendor and they're easily linked to Build American AI. They are not a core part of our strategy. This is an insane response because not only did they confirm in public in 4K on the record that this is their vendor and they are running these stock puppet meme pages, But they also admit that it's part of their strategy. Okay, maybe it's not the core part of their strategy, which maybe is other forms of influencer marketing. But the fact that the main super PAC for Open AI, Andreessen Horowitz, and Palantir is admitting that they are literally paying a self-professed

meme, meme Twitter accounts that are doing things like joking about swallowing semen, cannibalism, masad, mocking disabled people, and posting violent threats towards AI leaders is crazy. I just want to reiterate. Greg Brockman, president of Open AI, gave this super PAC millions and millions and millions of dollars. And this is what they're spending it on. My favorite quote tweet of their statement was this random person that tweeted bizarrely amateur comms here. They try four contradictory hangouts simultaneously. One, it's parody. No big deal. By the way, I will say a lot of people following these accounts did not realize their parody. And I don't know how much you can claim parity when you are literally

promoting the messaging and policy agenda of the super PAC that you're getting paid by. The guy tweets, one, it's parity, no big deal. Two, outside vendor. Okay, if it's an outside vendor and it's no big deal, then why are you distancing yourself? Number three, these accounts are easily linked to us. Okay, so you just erase the distance. And number four, this is a minor part of our strategy. Okay, so now you do effectively all these accounts.

Another account tweeted, build American AI just confirmed that it hired a vendor to operate anonymous accounts mimicking its critics. The irony here is almost too perfect. This organization lobbies Congress for National AI Regulation in the name of of safety and trust. But reporters like Taylor Lorenz just exposed them running sock puppet accounts to attack their critics. The hypocrisy is fracturing the entire AI safety coalition. And I want to bring it back to Open AI again as well.

Because this entire super pack was the brainchild of Chris Lehane, Open AI's head of policy. And you have these open AI figures like they're head of strategy engaging with these offensive meme accounts that are pushing the leading the future messaging. And Greg Brockman, who's open AI's president, has tried to be like, oh, well, you know, I actually just donated in a personal capacity. Leading the future is totally separate from open AI, blah, blah, blah, but leading the future exists literally directly to promote the messaging and agenda of open AI. And just this week, OpenAI issued this whole press release trying to distance itself from leading the future and claim, listen guys, Greg Brockman, he just donated in a personal capacity to leading the future.

Leading the future does not work on behalf of Open AI. No outside political group speaks for Open AI or represents the company. It's like, sure, but again, the whole reason this pack exists is because your head of policy came up with the idea. Your president funded it. And now this pack just goes around attacking any politician that might hurt your business. And I thought this one tweet from this guy, Jay Schuster, was really funny. He quote, tweeted the open AI press release distancing itself from leading the future. And he goes, politicians everywhere breathe a sigh of relief today.

Finally, they can safely oppose Open AI knowing that Greg Brockman will try to destroy their careers strictly in a personal capacity. That made me laugh because, again, the whole thing with the personal capacity is nonsense. This PAC is acting on behalf of OpenAI's policy agenda. But as I wrote in my story on Substack, which I highly suggest that you subscribe and read, if the tech billionaires and AI boosters who are funding and operating leading the future and build American AI truly believe that artificial intelligence will transform society for the better, they should be willing to make that case openly and transparently. And whether leading the future finance these meme accounts directly or just

of cultivated the network that produced them. The result is ultimately this very polluted information ecosystem that warps the public perception of AI in a way that's favorable to companies like Open AI. As lawmakers debate the future of this technology, we all have the right to know exactly who is shaping that conversation and whose interest they're ultimately serving. I could have ultimately taken that brand deal with Build American AI months ago and made thousands and thousands of dollars. I could have probably paid my rent for the year with that. And so I just want to reiterate again that saying no to this stuff and actually doing hardcore investigative reporting on these super PACs, on these influence networks, on how AI and the discourse around it is shaping our

world is not profitable. Okay, I have zero sponsors on this podcast, as you guys know. So if you like my work and you want to support my reporting on digital culture, AI, technology, et cetera, please, please buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter at usermag.com. That's usermag.com or support me on Patreon also below. On both platforms, I do monthly Q&As, bonus content, and you're helping to ensure that me and the independent journalist that I collaborate with can continue to make a living calling this type of stuff out. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.