The NPR Politics Podcast - Why AI groups are spending millions to influence midterms

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Super PACs with ties to the artificial intelligence industry are spending millions to influence midterm elections this year. We discuss who is behind the spending and what they stand to gain.This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Eric McDaniel, and technology correspondent Shannon Bond.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. And I'm Shannon Bond. I cover technology. Today on the show, groups linked to the artificial intelligence industry are spending tens of millions of dollars to shape congressional races this year. Shannon, there is a lot of money in politics. What's the AI industries play here? Yeah. I mean, this industry is just the latest to realize that if you spend money on getting candidates, elected, that might have good outcomes for you. But what really seeing is that this year's midterm elections have become kind of a proxy battle in this sort of ongoing war over how AI should be regulated. You know, and they think there is, you know, widespread bipartisan recognition in Congress that lawmakers, you know, do need to set some rules around this technology, which is, you know, being developed really quickly, being deployed really quickly, has huge consequences for the economy, for jobs, for people's energy bills. At the same time, despite that bipartisan consensus, all efforts to advance federal legislation so far have stalled out. But the AI companies and AI

interests are not waiting around for a bill to be on the table. They really want to be involved in picking who is going to write that kind of legislation. So what we've seen is that AI-focused super PACs have already spent over $43 million on congressional races this cycle. That's according to Open Secrets, which tracks campaign. pain spending. And then there's even more being spent when you add in local races, you know, states like California, Texas, where there is a lot of interest among state lawmakers about regulating AI. And so we're just seeing like lots and lots of interest. And it's breaking down in pretty interesting ways among these companies. And this is playing out in a big way in one race that you guys

have been following quite closely. It's the race to replace the retiring Democratic Congressman Jerry Nadler. He's from New York City. Eric, that primary is today. Can you just explain why this race in particular is getting so much AI money? I mean, in part the reason there's so much money here is it's New York's 12th congressional district, which is right in the heart of Manhattan. You need a lot of money to get any attention at all. The other one is because one of the men running is a prominent state assemblyman who helped lead the charge on state AI regulation there. His name is Alex Boris. He's an ex-Palentier employee, which is a big AI firm and prominent government. contractor founded by a Trump ally billionaire Peter Thiel. The lax regulation folks have helped to raise Boris's profile with the amount of money they've spent attacking him. Then the pro safety standard

AI folks threw in their cash to defend him. So now we've seen, I don't know, $25 or $26 million in this race. And now Boris is in a dead heat with a former Mayor Bloomberg staffer, Micah Lashir. And that's despite all of the other really famous names in the race like George Conway or Kennedy, Sion, Jack Slashberg. I think they are internet famous, if nothing else. Yeah, there you go. Shannon and Eric mentioned that there are like pro-regulation and anti-regulation AI groups. Can you just like help untangle who these groups are that are spending money in this primary? Almost all of this outside spending that's come in is coming from two groups.

And they are broadly aligned with Open AI on one side and Anthropic on the other side. Those are like the two big leading US AI companies. That's chat GPT and Claude. Exactly. So they compete over everything, right? Like customers for their chatbots, investors. They're both planning to go public later this year. You know, they compete over staff.

They have wildly different approaches in a way when it comes to thinking about how AI should be built, commercialized, governed. Anthropic was actually founded by, you know, dissidents who left Open AI because they felt like the company. wasn't focused enough on safety. And so you have these two networks of PACs that are affiliated with these two sides. So on the one hand, there is Leading the Future. It was funded by OpenAI investors, big investors, Andreson Horowitz, as well as the company's president, Greg Brockman. And then you have Public First, which is funded in part by Anthropic and has been explicitly positioned in opposition to leading the future. So leading the future was the one who came in, initially opposing Boris in New York 12. And basically kind of targeting him because, you know, he was

involved in this state legislation, it has taken this position really highlighting the risks. If you get regulation wrong, it'll be a risk to innovation. It'll be a risk to the U.S. winning the AI race with China. It's argued for a national approach, you know, sort of a federal framework of AI safety and regulation versus what it calls a patchwork of state rules. And then Anthropic aligned public first, you has really kind of more lined up with Anthropics position, generally supporting more regulation, including at the state level. And so it came in defending Boris. And so together, you know, they have now spent more than $20 million in this primary, you know, as Eric said, and that's a safe blue seat. Yes, in an expensive media market. But like, this is just, you know,

the kind of money you're not typically seeing, you know, in this kind of race. And I should note here that Anthropic is a financial supporter of NPR. Shannon, I'm wondering if you're just like a regular person at home watching TV, are you going to be able to tell from the ads that they are being funded by AI companies or people allied with AI? It's a bit of a mixed bag. So, you know, some of the early ads against Boris from this, you know, a group aligned with Open AI investors, you know, pointed out specifically, you know, we don't want this state patchwork of rules. I mean, this is the wrong approach to AI regulation. But they've also just taken like, you know, kind of much more straightforward, you know, political attacks, you know, criticizing his past employment at Palantir, you know, just like really kind of going very personal. And then kind of talking about other issues, you know, actually, ironically, there was a recent ad that was sort of highlighting he's not being funded from people in New York. It's coming from AI companies in California, you know, an ad brought to you by an AI company in California. That's amazing. But also just like sort of classic campaign money. Exactly. And so, you know, it's a little bit all over the place. Boris has talked about his approach and, you know, this is sort of his signature legislation, this state bill. But certainly AI is not like the main theme of this race, despite the fact that so much of this outside money coming in is coming from AI groups. All right. Well, we are going to have the results of that New York race and many others on the pod tomorrow. But one thing I'm wondering, given that AI is on both sides in this race, when the dust.

settles with this one. Do you think there'll be any lessons that can be drawn about the political influence of this industry? Just at the 30,000 foot level, this is all kind of an acknowledgement. All this money is an acknowledgement that the future on AI is still unwritten from a regulatory perspective, right? These companies know that everyone in Washington at this point agrees that AI's too big to ignore. The White House has been involved. Congress has been having task forces and chit chats and fireside whatever's, but they've not moved from the chalkboard or the drafting table to the permanent record yet. So there's a lot of opportunity to influence not just what the rules are, but who is writing them, which is why we're seeing all this campaign spending. All right, well,

we are going to have more on that aspect of it when we get back, but we're going to take a quick break right now. And we're back. And a recent poll from Pew found two-thirds of Americans say AI is advancing too quickly. And more people expect negative effects from AI on themselves and society, then think it will be a positive. So I'm wondering, is all this spending on congressional campaigns part of trying to address this public perception problem? I don't think so. I mean, I think this is mostly self-interest, right? Like Anthropic and Open AI and every other AI company has a lot of interest on the federal rules that will govern how they operate their businesses. But it is a concern for lawmakers and policy advocates who are weighing in on all of this, because if the public

isn't bought in to either the approach to regulating AI or AI itself, then, you know, all of the things that people interested in the United States economy and, like, general life in the country aren't going to be able to deploy it in the way they want to. If you don't believe in AI or data center expansion and all of those things, then it's going to be really hard for you to get behind, like, investing a lot of money in beating China in an AI race, right? Like investing federal money. Right. Yeah. Or just, like, devoting federal attention and, like, figuring out how to, you know, support, say, scientific research into AI or any of those things, right? Like,

if the government and AI companies don't eventually invest into getting the public on board, then the whole regulatory environment is going to be much different than I think, you know, any one of these companies would hope for. You know, it strikes me that in the beginning, social media companies, which were a new technology many years ago, they had a bit of a halo around them. And it took a while for the public sentiment to turn on them. But with AI, public sentiment starts out in a much worse place than it started out with those companies. Yeah, I think that's right. And AI is a little bit different than social media in that it is, I think, much more aligned with like traditional

business and industry generally, right? It's not like considered a domain of like, I don't know, like fun or recreation or whatever kind of social media and Facebook started out as, right? This is kind of explicitly part of the professional world now. And there are two things to know with like where this is starting in Congress. One is no one I talk to thought regulation was coming this year before the midterm elections. It's too complex to sort out with tiny majorities during a campaign season. Too many big questions on approach remain. And two, the big fight right now at least isn't what rules to put in place, but how much should be done by Congress versus the statehouse. And this is an issue that Shannon talked about with these groups

weighing in on, right? There's differences of opinion within the AI industry. And it's also not a partisan red versus blue fight. The split is more kind of industry boosters who see this as a competition with China and a way to grow the economy and all of those things. And more, I don't know, I might call it like populist or pro-consumer tighter guardrails folks who are more worried about safety and economic opportunity. If I had to characterize it, I'd say many Republicans want to limit states from making rules to limit the overall number of regulations that these AI companies have to contend with. But there are also some folks on the left who want limits on states to avoid a patchwork of rules. One of those folks is Adam Kovasevic. She's founder and CEO of this group

called Chamber of Progress, which is a center left tech policy group. And he outlined to me the federal rules he wants to see and the concerns he has with state regulations. We can do things like set standards for frontier models, for algorithmic discrimination, for transparency, for fairness. And unfortunately, we're seeing a creep of blue state laws on those topics, which end up becoming kind of a de facto national standard, but that's not the best way to regulate AI. Then you've got folks from the more conservative policy world and progressive policy world who want to see states be able to exercise their own judgment here because historically states have moved more quickly on regulation. Here's Daniel Cochran. He's a senior fellow at the Family First Tech Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. The group says it works to strengthen family life and advance the welfare of children. What we've seen over and over again is that while Congress has essentially fiddled under the influence of big tech lobbyists, states like Texas and Florida and Utah, they've been leading the charge to hold these companies accountable. We need them to be able to respond quickly. And that's really what our federalist system is designed to allow.

So obviously, a lot of contours here. It's not red versus blue straight up. And there's a lot of opportunity. I think we'll see after the midterms for crosspart. party work. Huh. I mean, so I, part of me is very skeptical because I have followed Congress's attempts to regulate other industries. And they often, especially when it's a new technology, get tied in knots and then don't really do anything. And I think that there's kind of a long history of that. Is this any different? I mean, it hasn't happened yet, right? Like, there was a report during the 118th Congress, we're in 119. now, so say 18 months ago on an AI task force and we haven't seen legislation move. We haven't

seen action this Congress outside of some proposed ideas on children's safety related stuff and some deep fake legislation. But I mean, I think this is going to become just too massive a part of the U.S. economy not to touch at all. And I think the other thing we're seeing is that, you know, the AI companies are looking around seeing what has worked for other industry. And, you know, a big thing happening here is they're taking a page from the crypto playbook. So, you know, back in 2024, there were super PACs aligned with the crypto industry that spent more than $100 million in elections that year. And, you know, got results. They helped get several pro-crypto candidates elected. You know, Congress has passed a bill favorable to the industry. You know, Trump has signed executive orders favor to the industry. And, you know, it's pretty explicit this playbook. There's lots of overlaps here. So there's one of the big pro-crypto super PACs, you know, has shares donors with leading the future, the pack backed by OpenAI investors. And one of the strategists of that pack is a spokesperson for this crypto PAC. So, you know, they've seen that there is a return on investment in terms of putting money into elections to help choose, as Eric says, you know, the people who are going to be at the table and who are going to be making these laws.

Well, and President Trump was as extremely. explicitly pro-crypto a candidate as you could get. Exactly. Exactly. You know, where he falls in AI, I think is a much more complicated question, as we've seen with the administration's ongoing fight with Anthropic. Yeah. That's a whole other podcast. That is a whole other podcast. But, you know, I do think that we should be clear that although AI is spending a lot of money in these elections to have influence, it's not like they don't already have a seat at the table. That's right. They are in open conversations with the White House.

They, you know, executives were at the table with leading at the G7 meeting, the meeting of the world's leading economies. The CEO of Anthropic was with the Pope. I mean, they're at the table. Yeah, and they're already spending a lot of money lobbying, right? So, you're just looking at lobbying disclosures, you know, last year, just four companies, Open AI, meta, alphabet, which is the parent of Google and Invita, which is a big AI chipmaker. They spent almost $51 million lobbying members of Congress. That's according to issue one. You know, they've just, you know, been hiring more lobbyists.

And then we're seeing that already increasing this year. So Anthropics already more than quadrupled its lobbying, spending in the first quarter, open AI nearly doubled it. So, you know, all of this, like, you know, this money is coming in all over the place. And, you know, they have major investments. And so in a way, you know, these amounts of money we're talking about millions when they're looking at their balance sheets are not maybe significant. to them in terms of what they could see, the getting out of spending this money in Washington and on campaigns. All right, let's leave it there for today. And I should note that Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is also a financial supporter of NPR. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover

Congress. And I'm Shannon Bond. I cover technology. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.