AI Companies Are Buying the 2026 Midterms. Here Is Who Is Paying Whom.
April 22, 2026
OpenAI and Anthropic are not just rivals in the lab. They are now fighting each other for control of the US Congress.
The 2026 midterm elections have become the first full-scale electoral war between artificial intelligence companies. Two rival super PACs, each backed by different AI giants, are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into congressional races to decide one question: who gets to regulate AI, and how hard.
On one side is Leading the Future, backed primarily by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. The group has committed to spending over $125 million in the 2026 cycle. Its goal is a single national AI framework that would override the patchwork of state-level AI laws now multiplying across the country. It operates through two arms: Think Big, which backs Democrats, and American Mission, which backs Republicans.
On the other side is Public First Action, funded with a $20 million donation from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI. Public First supports candidates who favor stronger AI guardrails. It is bipartisan by design, led by a former Democratic lawmaker and a former Republican one. Its affiliated PACs have run ads backing Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer in New Jersey and Republican Senators Marsha Blackburn and Pete Ricketts.
The first real battlefield is New York's 12th Congressional District. State assemblyman Alex Bores, who wrote some of New York's toughest AI regulatory bills, is running in a Democratic primary to replace Jerry Nadler. Leading the Future has spent over $1.1 million in ads attacking him. Public First Action has spent $450,000 defending him. Neither ad mentions artificial intelligence. They talk about Trump megadonors, ICE raids, and the Affordable Care Act, because voters respond to those frames, not to debates about algorithmic transparency.
That concealment is the story. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, six of the biggest AI and tech companies, including Alphabet, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI, hired 307 federal lobbyists and spent a combined $20 million on federal lobbying. That is roughly $226,000 a day, every day, for three months.
The spending is not random. It is targeted at the exact moment when courts, states, and regulators are closing in on the industry. Over 600 AI bills have been introduced in state legislatures in 2026. A federal judge recently limited what Google can argue in court. Congress is circling. The industry is responding by trying to buy the composition of the next Congress before those votes are cast.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said publicly that AI money will "end up being toxic." Alex Bores told CNN that the billionaires attacking him are "terrified of having someone in Congress that's already beaten them."
What is happening is not new. Oil, pharma, and finance have all done it before. What is new is the speed, the scale, and the fact that the companies spending this money are building the very systems that will decide how information, labor, and power are distributed for the next generation.
The question is whether voters will notice before November.
Sources: NBC News, Texas Tribune, FEC filings, Issue One, Prism News, April 2026.