The largest players in artificial intelligence want to match the crypto sector’s 2024 campaign spending playbook. They’ve got a $100-million-powered super PAC waiting in the wings. Capitol Hill is nervous.
The crypto industry deployed well over $100 million in the last election, including an eye-watering $40 million to help defeat former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). The scale of that spending was unprecedented in modern politics.
The results speak for themselves. Congress has already passed one significant piece of crypto legislation — the GENIUS Act — which became law in July. And more crypto-friendly changes are in the works.
More than a year out, artificial intelligence players from OpenAI and Meta are already pledging similar amounts to what helped deliver crypto’s biggest policy asks.
“Sometimes industries need a big bazooka so they’re not being ignored,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), one of crypto’s foremost advocates on the Hill. “And that’s a big bazooka.”
The strategy. The AI and venture capital industries are betting on the Republican Congress moving quickly to establish a single set of easy-to-live-with rules that would preempt tougher state regulations.
There are actually at least two bazookas, to use Lummis’ description.
One is a network of super-PACs with more than $100 million behind them. Those super-PACs have the backing of OpenAI President Greg Brockman, the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, Perplexity and others. They’re starting with bipartisan pro-AI candidates in states — including blue New York and California — and then ramping up to federal elections.
Meta, meanwhile, is putting millions behind a separate, state-based, bipartisan effort.
Neither has outlined who it’s trying to promote, or topple from public service.
The totals, though, would be big money, even in federal elections, let alone state races.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) noted races in her home state are “going to be very expensive,” so tech money could have an impact.
Slotkin, a moderate who was one of the main Democratic beneficiaries of crypto money in the 2024 election cycle, warned it would be “short-sighted” if tech’s strategy involved funding Republicans only.
Not-a-fan club. Slotkin’s fellow Michigander, Sen. Gary Peters (D), who led Senate Democrats’ election efforts last cycle, doesn’t like where campaign finance trends are headed.
“I never like when industries put [a] massive amount of money into politics,” Peters said. “It’s usually never a good thing, whatever the industry is.”
Plenty of Republicans think state AI rules will cripple the industry and even hand over the future to China.
However, the GOP’s Big Tech skeptics are also unamused. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who helped successfully defeat a prior effort to preempt state AI laws, acknowledged the industry “will probably have a lot of influence,” which he said would be bad.
“Nothing they don’t want crosses that floor,” Hawley said, pointing to the doors of the Senate chamber.
