AI embraces crypto’s dirty politics
A new super PAC network looks set to spend millions to influence AI regulation
The AI industry has already shown an appetite for dirty lobbying tactics, but things look set to get even worse.
On Monday, Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Perplexity, and investors Ron Conway and Joe Lonsdale launched Leading the Future, a new network of super PACs and 501c(4)s to “organize political support and elect pro-innovation candidates at scale.”
Leading the Future is launching with more than $100m in funding, enough to make it one of the biggest spenders in congressional elections. The aim is clear: throw obscene amounts of money at politicians to discourage AI regulation.
The network will “support candidates aligned with the pro-AI agenda … and oppose those that do not,” the announcement reads, with plans to operate in both primary contests and general elections. Statements accompanying the launch talk of needing to kill policies that “make it impossible to build” or “enable China to gain global AI superiority” — claims that will doubtless be weaponized against any and all AI regulation.
Leading the Future is, according to the Wall Street Journal, modeled on Fairshake — a super-PAC network that pushed a pro-crypto agenda in the 2024 elections. Josh Vlasto, one of the founders of Leading the Future, was Fairshake’s spokesman and media strategist.
Fairshake, which alongside affiliated super PACs spent about $135m last year, has a simple strategy. “If you are pro-crypto, we will help you, and if you are anti we will tear you apart,” a person familiar with its approach told the New Yorker.
In last year’s elections, Fairshake pumped millions of dollars into campaigns opposing politicians that the group deemed unfriendly. Many ads avoided mentioning crypto, in one instance simply calling a candidate a “liar” and a “bully” and falsely suggesting they had taken money from the pharma and oil industries. An employee at Coinbase, a major donor to Fairshake, told the New Yorker that “it wasn’t really about explaining how crypto works, or anything like that. It’s about hitting politicians where they are most sensitive—reelection.”
The figure behind much of Coinbase’s political work at the time was Chris Lehane, now head of global affairs at OpenAI. Lehane was “involved in initial conversations earlier in the year about the need to help shape [AI] industry-friendly policies,” the WSJ reported.
Lehane previously ran Airbnb’s policy team, where he adopted a similar approach to pressure politicians into doing his bidding. Someone who worked with him at the time put it simply: “The goal was intimidation, to let everyone know that if they fuck with us they’ll regret it.”
Fairshake has shown that such spending gets results: it won almost all the races it spent on last year, and likely convinced many other politicians to go easy on crypto lest they draw Fairshake’s wrath. In turn, America now has an exceedingly pro-crypto Congress, which has already started passing bills to help the industry.
Leading the Future’s partners already have a grim track record. As Transformer reported last year, Andreessen Horowitz masterminded a campaign to kill SB 1047 last year that was full of misleading and false claims. Democratic power-broker Conway, who owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic, was also involved. And Zac Moffatt, who runs Leading the Future alongside Vlasto, has previously worked on misleading ad campaigns for Meta in its battle with TikTok.
The new organization’s launch comes as AI companies gear up for another series of state-level political fights, most notably in California and New York (both of which LTF has said it’ll begin operating in this year). Alongside funding LTF, Andreessen Horowitz is backing the American Innovators Network, a group which reportedly plans to invest “north of six figures” to oppose AI regulation in New York.
OpenAI, meanwhile, is hiring lobbyists in California in an effort to stifle new regulation there, and there are already signs of the Fairshake playbook, insinuating without evidence that one AI safety group was secretly funnelling money through another.
In August of last year Rick Claypool of Public Citizen, a non-profit which advocates for campaign finance reform, published a report analyzing the crypto industry’s attempt to buy political favor.
“Crypto did not invent the corporate political influence strategy of rewarding candidates who agree to do an industry’s bidding while threatening those who resist corporate power,” Claypool wrote. “But no industry has ever before so wholeheartedly embraced raising as much directly from corporations and openly using that political war chest as a looming threat (or reward) to discipline lawmakers toward adopting an industry’s preferred policies.” Claypool later told the New York Times that “other sectors are going to try to duplicate this strategy.”
AI leaders seem to have taken that as a challenge.
This is important work. Thank you for this.
Thanks a lot for reporting on this!