Nida Allam, a 32-year-old Democrat, was fighting a close North Carolina primary when a barrage of ads swept in.
Over five days in February, the blitz across TV, radio and social media painted the incumbent, Rep. Valerie Foushee, as a liberal crusader. “She is leading the fight to hold ICE accountable,” one ad said of Foushee, who co-chairs a Democratic House commission on artificial intelligence.
The $1.6 million raft of ads in North Carolina’s 4th District was the largest amount spent by any outside group in the race. It came from Public First Action, a network of super PACs and nonprofit organizations linked to Anthropic, the maker of the chatbot Claude.
“All this money surging in,” Allam said of Public First. “It shows very clearly that they were panicked. They kept dropping more and more.” Allam has backed calls from congressional Democrats for a moratorium on new data center construction. She lost by about 1,000 votes, a margin of less than 1 percent.
The booming AI industry, flush with investor cash, is mounting an expansive, but largely opaque campaign to influence midterm races around the country. Through Public First and a rival network of super PACs and nonprofits, competing factions within the AI industry have poured tens of millions of dollars into sharply tailored political messages that often don’t mention artificial intelligence and in some cases push contradictory positions on hot-button issues.
While running ads decrying Immigration and Customs Enforcement in North Carolina, Public First paid for others in Texas’s 9th Congressional District that took a conflicting stance on immigration enforcement. “REMOVE ILLEGALS … SEAL THE BORDER,” said text splashed across one video ad, promoting candidate Alex Mealer in the Republican primary.
Tech titans with close ties to President Donald Trump have won his support for industry-friendly policies like faster permitting for new data centers and revoking Biden-era oversight of AI firms. The deluge of money flowing into midterm races marks the emergence of the AI lobby as a fearsome player in electoral politics, with growing sway on issues unrelated to technology.
Campaign finance experts and critics of corporate funding in politics said that the industry interventions underscore how the warring corporate factions are out of step with the interests of the public.
“The loser in all of that is the typical everyday American voter who obviously doesn’t have a voice in that discussion because they don’t have $20 million,” said Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
Public First co-founder Brad Carson, a former Democratic member of the House, said the super PAC supported Foushee because she had been “a champion for reasonable rules on AI.” Tactics like pushing contradictory messages to voters in different districts is how politics works, he said.
“It’s called winning, as Charlie Sheen would say,” Carson said, referencing the actor’s viral 2011 outburst. “If you’re running a Republican primary in Texas or you’re running as a Democrat in the Upper East Side, the issues are going to be different.”
Carson said his super PAC has two policy priorities: export restrictions on chip sales to China to maintain U.S. dominance in AI, and opposing a White House proposal to stop states from passing AI laws, unless the federal government first passes its own plan to regulate AI.
Max Oget, communications director for Foushee’s campaign, said she was “a leading progressive policymaker in the AI space” and had supported residents fighting data center development.
Public First launched in November with a promise to fight Big Tech’s political influence and support regulations on AI. It pitched itself as a “counterforce” to a rival network of super PACs called Leading the Future that raised $140 million from Trump-aligned tech leaders including Greg Brockman, co-founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and investor Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of the data mining company Palantir. That effort was modeled on a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC called Fairshake that helped the industry secure favorable regulations by intervening in 2024 congressional races. OpenAI’s chief of global affairs, Chris Lehane, recently said Brockman donated in a personal capacity. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Leading the Future has threatened to fight candidates it claims will slow down AI’s explosive growth. Wired recently reported that it paid content creators to post in support of its policy priorities without disclosing its sponsorship.
“Leading the Future’s goal is to support a well-balanced, cross-partisan conversation about artificial intelligence, which today starts with passing a strong and thoughtful national regulatory framework,” said Jesse Hunt, a spokesperson for Leading the Future.
Carson said his network is focused on opposing the group. “We think Super PACs should be banned, but our decision was that, seeing the danger posed by Leading the Future, we would fight fire with fire,” he said. “We consider ourselves to be the anti-super PAC super PAC.”
Public First is not required to disclose its donors, but Anthropic, which also says it is pro-regulation, announced in February that it would donate $20 million. The company later clarified those funds could not be used for election ads. Carson said the company’s contribution is limited to public education spending, which can still include ads that promote individual politicians.
That is a common structure for companies and individuals involved in politics who “want some distance and some deniability,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said its donation was “exclusively in support of its mission to educate the public on AI policy and promote safe and responsible AI … and cannot be used for federal election activity.”
Public First has since raised an additional $30 million from thousands of individuals, including employees at Anthropic and all of the other major AI labs, Carson said. He said he has drawn inspiration from how Fairshake, the crypto super PAC, built a bigger war chest than past corporate groups.
Monmouth University political science professor Scott Hofer said Public First’s tactics are standard for corporate-linked political action committees that seek to foster a favorable climate in Washington. “You should be insanely skeptical that Anthropic is pushing to be regulated in a significant way,” he said.
Anthropic has expressed public support for some specific AI regulations, including attempts to require mandatory safety testing of some AI systems in California.
The rival AI-focused political committees are clashing at a time when polls indicate most Americans are pessimistic about the impact of the technology and expect it to eliminate some jobs.
A Quinnipiac University survey conducted in March found that 55 percent of Americans think AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives. More than 70 percent said businesses are not doing enough to be transparent about the use of AI, and a slightly larger proportion said the government wasn’t doing enough to regulate the technology.
Public First began its midterm interventions in February by running ads in support of Alex Bores, a Democratic candidate running for a House seat in New York’s 12th District. He helped pass the Raise Act, a state law that requires large AI developers to release information about their safety protocols.
Leading the Future had singled out Bores, a former Palantir employee, as its first target in November, calling the bill emblematic of how a patchwork of state rules would slow innovation and help China win on AI.
“He passed the strongest AI accountability law in the country,” one of Public First’s ads supporting Bores said. “Now, he’s taking that fight to Congress, abolishing ICE.”
Leading the Future has sunk almost $3.3 million into opposing Bores in advance of a crowded Democratic primary in June. Public First spent $2.3 million to support him, according to campaign filings.
The dueling donations over Bores helped make the AI super PACs look like natural enemies, divided by their stances on regulation and a cultural split in AI circles over the potential risks as the technology advances.
One faction argues that uber-intelligent AI could cause human extinction and that work is urgently needed to prevent harms like using AI to create novel bioweapons. Co-founders of Anthropic have close ties to that community, sometimes referred to as AI safety.
Donors behind Leading the Future, like billionaire investor Marc Andreessen, dismiss that group as “AI doomers” and have argued their efforts to push for stricter testing of AI models are a political ploy to hamstring competitors.
As Public First has intervened in more midterm races, some distinctions between the AI super PACs have blurred.
In New Jersey’s 5th District, both networks are paying for ads backing Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a five-term incumbent who co-chairs the Democratic commission on AI with Foushee. He received support from the crypto super PAC Fairshake in 2024 and later helped advance a Republican-led bill creating a regulatory lane for cryptocurrency.
Late last week, Carson revealed that Public First had also intervened in the primary to replace former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) in San Francisco.
Carson’s group funneled $500,000 into a super PAC backed by local tech figures that is opposing first-time Democratic candidate Saikat Chakrabarti, who has made AI regulation a central plank of his platform. His rivals include state Sen. Scott Wiener, who also favors AI regulation but has closer ties to the industry.
“You have one corporation saying they’re the good AI lobby, but they are two sides of the same coin,” Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for a progressive PAC called Justice Democrats that was co-founded by Chakrabarti, said of Anthropic and Public First. “The goal is to accelerate AI development as quickly as possible.”
Carson said Public First wants AI regulation and is fighting “a group of Silicon Valley people who — without exaggeration and quite openly — promise to destroy anyone who wants regulation.”
The warring political networks have also both suggested in ads that tech corporations are untrustworthy, including firms tied to their donors.
An ad for Bores in New York paid for by Public First flashed up the caption “HOLD BIG TECH ACCOUNTABLE” over an image of tech figures at Trump’s inauguration last year, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos. The companies have invested billions of dollars into Anthropic, Public First’s major backer. (Bezos owns The Post.)
One New York ad paid for by Leading the Future swiped at Bores’s former work at Palantir, saying he “made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE … powering their deportations.” The commercial did not mention that the network is backed by a Palantir co-founder.
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