Tracking the Flood of AI Political Spending: A new tool from Demand Progress will show you which pols are on the AI take

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https://prospect.org/2026/06/10/tracking-flood-ai-political-spending-demand-progress/


Credit: Douglas Rissing/iStock

Back in 2022, the cryptocurrency “industry” was facing some problems. Their product was sort of like money, though useful only for criminals, and also consumed nation-state amounts of electricity. A boom in NFTs—basically a receipt, except it doesn’t actually prove ownership—went bust. FTX, a major cryptocurrency exchange, turned out to be a giant fraud and collapsed. Congress and regulators at the Biden administration were closing in. What to do? The crypto moguls put their heads together and came up with the same solution as every corrupt swindler going back centuries: just buy the government! In 2024, the crypto industry was the largest corporate political spender by far, dropping $245 million to oust critics like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and elect friendly faces like Donald Trump. With the government bought and paid for, crypto indeed got a big package of deregulation, and might get more. Trump has even gotten into the crypto grift personally.

The next Silicon Valley trend, of course, has been artificial intelligence, and the big AI companies are already following in the footsteps of their crypto predecessors by setting up some heavily funded super PACs. That’s why the progressive nonprofit Demand Progress has set up a new monitoring effort, called AI Money Watch, following one particular AI PAC (note the space), Leading the Future (LTF). The group has raised $125 million from various Big Tech villains, including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI; and Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir. It’s run by Josh Vlasto and Zac Moffatt, a former crypto spokesman and Republican consultant, respectively. The Prospect obtained an exclusive preview of this effort, which will be vitally important during the upcoming midterms and in future elections.

The most obvious reason to track this spending is that any messaging the PAC produces will almost certainly be dishonest. AI as a business is quite unpopular, with 56 percent negative sentiment and just 38 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll. The data centers AI requires are even more unpopular, with a recent Heatmap News poll finding that Americans oppose them by a 71-21 margin—a 49-point swing in just one year. When something is this unpopular, its associated PACs tend to carefully avoid mentioning what they actually care about. Instead, they run pretextual ads bringing up unrelated pseudo-objections to their enemies. That’s how crypto took down Sen. Brown, and it’s how the Israel lobby took down Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Cori Bush (D-MO), and Thomas Massie (R-KY). So, when some ad campaign is talking about housing, jobs, or whatever, and it’s funded by LTF, it will be vitally important to point out what is really going on.

It will be even more important to identify the politicians who are taking lots of LFT money. The group’s “goal is clearly to just avoid regulation of any kind, despite what they say,” said Colin McGlynn, an AI policy adviser at Demand Progress. “They get mad when we say that because they’re like, ‘No, we support a national framework. We just don’t ever support any of the components of it that would exist. We oppose every particular proposal.’” Let’s be real: Like practically every industry in history, Big AI is against nearly any regulation unless they are the ones writing the rules. So given that Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) has taken $982,688 from LTF at time of writing (and been endorsed by LTF), it’s fair to ask what the group thought they were paying for. “If you are going to take the money from the people that say, ‘No, don’t regulate anything,’ then you’ve lost credibility,” said McGlynn.

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