OpenAI super PAC plans $125M push in 2026 US elections

This story marks a new phase in the AI race: frontier labs are no longer just competing on model benchmarks and GPUs, but on political power. OpenAI’s affiliated super PAC, backed heavily by president Greg Brockman and major Silicon Valley investors, is explicitly trying to shape who writes the rules for AI. Anthropic is counter‑mobilizing via its own aligned PAC, Public First. That creates an arms race in Washington parallel to the one in model training, where regulatory capture and narrative control become key strategic assets.

For the race to AGI, this level of spending means US AI policy is likely to be written with heavy input from the largest closed‑source labs. That could accelerate deployment and commercialization by steering away from hard caps on compute or strict release controls, even as both sides frame their agendas as “safety” and “innovation.” It also entrenches OpenAI and Anthropic as quasi‑political institutions, not just technology companies, which will make it harder for smaller labs and open‑source actors to have a voice in how frontier systems are governed.

The emerging dynamic resembles the trajectory of finance and Big Tech lobbying: once this much money is normal, it rarely goes back in the bottle. Race to AGI readers should expect regulatory outcomes to increasingly reflect this balance of political firepower.