AI executives and companies are betting that spending millions in the 2026 midterm elections will allow them to influence AI bills being developed in Congress.
As of the end of June, the two largest artificial intelligence political action committees have given at least $44 million to 40 House and Senate candidates, according to a CNBC analysis of Federal Election Commission data. This is an early taste of how the groups will spend the rest of the primary season and the more than $200 million raised in the general election, according to fundraising totals provided by the groups.
The growing AI industry’s spending makes it an increasingly powerful player in the Washington sphere of influence. The companies are positioning themselves — through their PACs — to shape how the first national law regulating the use of AI will be drafted.
Brad Carson, who heads Public First Action, a nonprofit organization with several PACs, said he’s seen several bills introduced and debated. Concerns around AI legislation have come into the spotlight, particularly around the capabilities and risks of powerful AI models like Mythos and Cloud Fable. Although no legislation is likely to cross the finish line this year, given the limited number of days legislators are in session, both parties have indicated that AI will remain a priority in the years to come.
“They have a lot of benefits. They have a lot of threats. And you can’t release them in the wild without any government concern,” Carson told CNBC. “Everyone from right to left, Trump supporter to anti-Trump, recognizes this.”
Leading the Future co-leader Josh Vlasto said it’s important for lawmakers to come up with the right regulatory framework.
“It’s very important that we do this now and urgently, because it’s still early in the technology, but it’s rapidly gaining mass adoption,” he told CNBC.
A large number of candidates supported by both PACs have won their primaries. Of the 28 candidates Leading the Future has endorsed, 25 have won their primaries, two have yet to face election and only one – Jesse Jackson Jr. – has lost. The group also opposed Alex Borres, who lost the Democratic primary in New York’s 12th Congressional District.
Public First Action has endorsed candidates in 11 races. Except for Bors, every candidate he supported has won. Carson said the group plans to spend 50-60 races by the end of the midterms.
The playbook AI companies are using is not new. In the run up to the 2024 elections, crypto-backed PAC Fairshake invested $200 million in the elections, supporting pro-crypto candidates on both sides of the aisle. Result: A major bill on stablecoins became law, and significant progress on a digital assets bill backed by major crypto companies coinbase And wave.
Leading the Future has spent more than $24 million on primary races so far through the end of June, according to data filed with the Federal Election Commission. The group said it raised $125 million by the end of 2025 from donors including private equity firm Andreessen Horowitz, Open AI co-founder Greg Brockman. palantir Co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and AI software company Perplexity.
Public First Action, which launched last year, has spent $20 million so far, and last month announced it had raised $80 million by the end of June. According to a PAC spokesperson, the group received $20 million from Anthropic, although the amount is limited to educating the public on AI policy, not political purposes.
Pubic First Action does not disclose its donors; Anthropic disclosed its own donations. But Carson said the group has received donations from employees of OpenAI, Google, DeepMind and X.
Two AI groups spend big in politics
The two groups have gone head-to-head several times in the race, squaring off against each other in the Manhattan Democratic primary and even trading swipes in interviews.
Yet the policy differences between the two are far more subtle than simply “pro” or “anti” regulation. Both groups support guardrails to some degree and even overlap in areas such as the need to protect children online.
The biggest difference of opinion is on one of the most thorny issues in Washington — whether a single federal standard should preempt state laws around AI. But even on that issue, the groups are not completely on opposite ends of the debate.
Leading the Future advocates for “a comprehensive, national, consistent framework for regulation governing AI,” Vlasto said in an interview with CNBC. He denied that the group was against state laws, and pointed to its support of New York’s landmark AI law, the Raze Act., which Borsch helped lead as a New York assemblyman.
But the RAISE Act shows how complex the group’s stance is. Leading the Future spent approximately $8 million opposing Bourse, largely because of his push for a more aggressive RAISE Act than was ultimately signed into law.
Before the bill was signed into law, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul successfully pressured lawmakers to agree to changes to weaken reporting requirements and the size of penalties for AI companies — bringing the New York law in line with the one in California. Those changes resulted in Leading the Future supporting the final legislation, while still opposing one of the MPs who had supported the earlier version of the bill.
Public First Action is more supportive of state laws and has fought efforts to preempt them, although Carson said that if Washington “can come up with a comprehensive federal approach to these problems, then preemption is a natural part of our constitutional order.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill have tried and failed several times to block state laws. majority leader in the house Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., told CNBC that the state laws are “hurting innovation” and eliminating them “is going to be the foundation of everything we do.”
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., co-chairman of the commission established by House Democrats on AI, said that while “there’s certainly bipartisan rejection of giving waivers without doing anything,” he said many Democrats recently supported a children’s online safety bill that sets a federal standard for privacy standards as a floor.