Powerful A.I. Super PACs Duel Over U.S. Midterm Elections ⇥ nytimes.com

Theodore Schleifer, New York Times (gift link):

The bad blood between the super PACs comes as powerful Silicon Valley companies race to shape the future of A.I. regulation. The groups are two of the biggest spenders in this year’s midterm elections, laying out nearly $24 million and promising that over $100 million more is on the way.

Their financial duel is effectively a proxy war between two of the biggest A.I. companies, Anthropic and OpenAI. One super PAC, Public First, is allied with Anthropic, while the other, Leading the Future, is aligned with OpenAI.

If those names sound familiar to you, it could be because I covered this topic last month. Schleifer’s story is, of course, far more in-depth and better-sourced — and, as an outsider, it is a story that does not leave me feeling particularly confident in the A.I. policy prospects in the world’s most powerful country.

The amount of money A.I. companies have on hand is truly staggering. Of course all of them are spending tens of millions of dollars to influence the results of a midterm election, just like how Formula 1 teams, which used to be plastered in cryptocurrency ads, are now covered in logos for A.I. companies. It is only going to get worse.

OpenAI posted a response to its website claiming it has “not made donations to any super PACs”. This appears to be technically true, though not meaningfully so, as Leading the Future is funded by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and its founding was encouraged by OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. OpenAI says “any engagement with that organization has been in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company”, but the distinction between personal and business involvement seems wafer-thin when it comes to executives and super PACs reflecting the interests of the company they run.