How to buy an AI ‘grassroots’ movement
Build American AI is touting its list of more than 500,000 supporters. It spent at least half a million dollars on ads to get it
Build American AI, the policy organization funded by industry-backed super PAC Leading the Future, has been trumpeting the more than 500,000 people it’s signed up as “grassroots” advocates. What it doesn’t mention is that it spent more than half a million dollars on ads to get them.
Ads used to harvest signups had racked up somewhere between 10m and 12m views by the beginning of March, costing between $500,000 and $600,000, according to Google and Meta data. That appears to be the primary way Build American AI has built its list of claimed supporters to at least 500,000, a number Leading the Future’s leaders recently told Punchbowl is now close to 1m. The ads ask users to help the United States AI industry “beat China” and “keep AI innovation and jobs here at home” by providing their contact information.
Because Build American AI is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, it does not have to disclose its donors, and it’s unknown whether any AI executives or companies have contributed directly. However, FEC data indicates that the group had received $500,000 by the end of last year from Leading the Future, a super PAC which has raised at least $50m from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of venture firm a16z, AI firm Perplexity, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna.
Representatives for Build American AI and Leading the Future did not address questions about the campaign provided by Transformer.
These types of tactics are not new in American politics — every policy group has their spin. Public First Action has cast its efforts as a fight against “Big Tech,” for example, when its only disclosed donor — Anthropic — is a $380b tech firm. But Build American AI’s description of a mailing list it built mostly via paid ads as evidence of “grassroots” activism is a classic of the genre, and a good reminder to take claims of an organic groundswell of support with a grain of salt.
There is also the question of why Build American AI felt it was worth spending almost a half of a million dollars creating the group. Brad Carson, who co-leads Public First Action, described the list of supporters as “vaporware.”
To understand why building such a list might seem useful, its worth looking at the tactics deployed by the Stand With Crypto Alliance, a 501(c)(4) created by Coinbase. America’s most popular crypto exchange, Coinbase was also one of the largest donors to the pro-crypto Super PAC Fairshake, which (with its affiliated super PACs) made crypto the biggest industry spender in the 2024 general election. Though they weren’t formally connected, Stand With Crypto and Fairshake often worked in alignment. Chris Lehane, a former Clinton White House lawyer turned political strategist, now Chief Global Affairs Officer at OpenAI, is often credited as the architect of this multi-pronged political strategy.
Stand With Crypto gave candidates a letter grade based on their position on crypto policy and established local chapters of “crypto advocates” across the country who would write to and call their Congressional representatives from time to time. They also made at least four visits to the Capitol to advocate for the same policies Coinbase and other Fairshake donors also supported. Build American AI’s advocate operation looks set to follow this model.
It’s not as though each of, or even many, Stand With Crypto “advocates” became effective organizers, but the operation helped crypto a ton with optics. Being able to point to people who were not political megadonors, but rather everyday people who supported light touch regulatory policies, helped shift the conversation to one less about the niche policy demands of a few executives and more about the desires of the “crypto voter.”
That’s even more valuable in the context of AI policy, where there is bipartisan, populist frustration with billionaire executives exercising their influence. Stand With Crypto’s advocacy also made it harder for politicians to dismiss its narrative without seeming dismissive of at least some of their constituents. It also made it hard for the media to report on evidence that there really never was a significant group of crypto voters without the caveat that Stand With Crypto had contradictory numbers.
Whether those sorts of “advocates” know exactly what they signed up for is another question. Some of the ads run by Build American AI present it as a champion of proactive AI regulation. One ad, for example, states that “Congress must act now,” while another calls on the viewer to “support President Trump’s call for a national standard.” But Build American AI and its affiliated organizations have never presented concrete details of what that national standard should look like — and have previously supported efforts that would overturn the state bills that have sprung up in its absence.
The groups Build American AI actively opposes, meanwhile, generally call for more stringent federal regulation. The only mention Transformer could find of regulation on the group’s website (other than their privacy policy) is in the text of a letter template to send to legislators that reads: “let’s clear away unnecessary regulations.” Several other ads frame Build American AI’s advocacy as opposing “state-by-state AI rules,” and preferring a federal standard — which aligns much more closely with its stated mission.
While the expensively put together list of supporters appears made up of plenty of real people, it’s difficult to say how many, if any, are strongly committed to Build American AI’s mission, beyond tapping their details into a webpage.
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