Anthropic and OpenAI clash over midterm election policies

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The rivalry between AI super PACs has escalated into a bizarre new arena: the campaign trail. On Tuesday, New York Democratic congressional candidate Alex Bores, a vocal proponent of AI regulation, threw down an unusual gauntlet. He formally challenged Leading the Future, the $100 million pro-AI super PAC bankrolled by Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, to an in-person debate. The conditions, laid out in a press release, were straightforward: Leading the Future could pick the moderator and its own representative, but it must commit to a public debate before the June 23rd primary.

The odds of this debate actually happening are essentially zero. Leading the Future declined to comment on the challenge. Yet the mere act represents a sharp turn in a trend that has been building for months. AI industry super PACs are no longer just anonymous funding vehicles; they are developing distinct political identities that mirror the companies and founders behind them. And those identities are now being used as weapons against each other.

When Leading the Future launched last year, it looked like a standard super PAC,a collection of wealthy individuals and corporations united by shared policy goals, operating at both the state and federal level. (This is, of course, politics supercharged by the Citizens United ruling, which allowed unlimited corporate donations to these independent groups.) But the landscape shifted quickly. Meta soon announced its own AI-focused super PACs, signaling that its political and business interests did not perfectly align with the LTF coalition. Over time, Leading the Future became widely perceived not as a vehicle for the entire AI industry, but as a proxy for OpenAI specifically, given that several of its key backers are investors in the frontier AI company. That perception hardened earlier this year when Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action, a bipartisan super PAC network that is now supporting Bores.

Legally, super PACs cannot coordinate directly with candidates on messaging or ad buys. But what is happening here is something new. Instead of simply backing one candidate against another, companies are using these PACs to attack their corporate rivals, with the candidate serving as a convenient focal point. Public First is now synonymous with Anthropic and, in the eyes of LTF, with a “doomer” philosophy. Meanwhile, Bores himself now refers to LTF as “the Marc Andreessen-Greg Brockman-Joe Lonsdale-backed Leading the Future super PAC.” And because of strict non-coordination laws, Bores,the coauthor of New York’s RAISE Act,can plausibly claim distance from whatever Anthropic-funded political maneuvers are happening on his behalf. Corporate money remains corporate money, after all.

This is not even the end of the story. In March, a new pro-AI, political advocacy nonprofit called Innovation Council Action (ICA) emerged. Run by former Trump adviser Taylor Budowich and armed with a $100 million war chest, ICA has the explicit “blessing” of David Sacks, the former White House special adviser on AI and crypto. ICA will focus on promoting Trump’s AI agenda, which means navigating a new internal GOP conflict: populist-leaning candidates who resist the pro-industry positions Trump has been convinced to adopt. The catch? ICA is a “dark money nonprofit,” meaning its donors do not have to be disclosed,a level of opacity that super PACs do not enjoy.

Meanwhile, prediction markets are causing their own political firestorm. The Senate Commerce Committee is holding its first hearing on sports betting and prediction markets, and the tech industry is sending in its heaviest hitters. Patrick McHenry, the former Republican chair of the House Financial Services Committee who left Congress to join a16z as a crypto lobbyist, will testify on behalf of the Coalition for Prediction Markets. But the real tension is coming from the industries that see prediction markets as a direct threat: casinos, futures markets, and traditional sports betting. A new “watchdog” group called FairPredicts has launched a six-figure ad buy timed for the hearing, plastering Washington metro stations, digital ads, and even buses circling Capitol Hill with ads that parody Kalshi’s earlier green marketing blitz.

And then there is the Clarity Act. The bill, which would establish a financial framework for stablecoins, passed its Senate Banking Committee markup last week with a surprisingly smooth 15–9 vote after just three hours of debate. But the drama is far from over. Coinbase dramatically withdrew its support over interest yield concerns. Traditional banks had a meltdown. And now, a growing coalition of normally misaligned groups,police unions worried about money laundering tracking, and labor unions concerned about pension fund drains,are joining the banks in opposition. Once again, technology is making horseshoe theory happen: the far right and far left are converging on a shared enemy.

For now, this newsletter is signing off for two weeks. With any luck, the intersection of politics and technology will not explode too dramatically while I am gone. But that might be a lot to ask.