According to Gizmodo, a massive political money war over AI regulation is erupting with unprecedented scale. A new anti-AI super PAC called Public First just formed with plans to raise $50 million, directly countering the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future that launched earlier with $100 million banked. Public First is backed by billionaires including Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, while Leading the Future counts OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Marc Andreessen, and Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale as supporters. The money involved dwarfs traditional political spending – the United Auto Workers’ PAC raised just $15 million for the 2024 cycle, while oil and gas gave $14 million to super PACs. These AI factions are already targeting specific candidates, like New York Assemblymember Alex Bores who faced millions in opposition spending for sponsoring AI safety legislation.
Billionaire Political Weapons
Here’s the thing about these super PACs – they’re basically legalized billionaire political weapons. Unlike regular PACs that have contribution limits, super PACs can raise unlimited money as long as they don’t coordinate directly with campaigns. So what do they do with all that cash? They run attack ads. Lots of them. And we’re talking about sums that rival presidential-level fundraising – Trump’s super PAC had $177 million by August, and crypto’s Fairshake super PAC has $140 million. But here’s what’s really wild: these AI super PACs are achieving that scale for what’s essentially a single-issue fight about technology regulation. It’s completely changing the financial landscape of American politics.
Weird Political Bedfellows
Now, the political alliances here are… confusing, to say the least. The pro-AI side, Leading the Future, somehow managed to irritate the Trump administration despite the Republican Party being the more natural fit for anti-regulation messaging. Meanwhile, Public First is setting up separate Democratic and Republican arms, meaning it’ll soon be supporting candidates with completely contradictory agendas. And get this – the Times reports that effective altruism types are involved in dreaming up Public First. You know, the movement that brought us Sam Bankman-Fried and philosophers debating whether killing a chimpanzee is worse than killing a human infant. So we’ve got crypto money, EA philosophy, and tech billionaires all converging on American elections. What could possibly go wrong?
Real-World Impact
We already got a taste of what this looks like in practice. When New York Assemblymember Alex Bores sponsored legislation requiring AI companies to prevent “critical harms,” he suddenly found himself targeted by California billionaires. Leading the Future vowed to spend millions keeping this “one random guy” out of Congress, as Bores told the San Francisco Examiner. He called it “a specific, small part of Silicon Valley that has an extreme minority viewpoint that there should be no regulation of AI whatsoever.” And you know what? He’s now famous in political circles. This is how it works – obscure local politicians become national targets because they dared to regulate technology. The message to other lawmakers is clear: cross the AI industry at your peril.
Drowning Out Democracy
So what does this actually mean for elections? Basically, we’re looking at two politically incoherent funding titans materializing to drown out everything else. While some might celebrate the lack of clear partisanship as bipartisan cooperation, it’s actually worse. It means elections become a high-stakes competition between anonymous billionaire factions using AI as a pretext for a food fight over what’s left of the American political process. The New York Times broke the Public First story, but we’re only seeing the beginning. With crypto super PACs already sitting on $140 million war chests and AI money pouring in, regular political concerns – you know, like healthcare, education, infrastructure – risk getting completely overshadowed. American elections were already painful slogs. Now they’re becoming something much weirder.
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