PAC Spending

Multiple technology-backed political action committees are mobilizing hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of the 2026 midterm elections to shape AI regulation policy, with competing visions of whether states or the federal government should control the industry. For institutional crypto investors tracking regulatory risk and policy capture, this spending surge signals that AI governance, and by extension, the regulatory framework for all emerging technologies, will be decided by money and political alignment rather than technical merit or public consensus.

• Leading the Future super PAC has raised over $125 million backed by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, and Andreessen Horowitz to oppose state-level AI regulations.
• Innovation Council Action plans to spend at least $100 million to support candidates committed to Trump’s federal consolidation of AI regulatory authority, excluding state oversight.
• Anthropic-backed Public First Action aims to raise $75 million supporting candidates who preserve individual states’ rights to regulate AI independently.

• $125M Leading the Future super PAC capital raised since August 2025
• $100M Innovation Council Action planned spending to enforce Trump’s federal AI framework
• $65M Meta’s American Technology Excellence Project budget for state-level candidates

The 2026 midterm elections are shaping up as a referendum on who controls artificial intelligence regulation in America, and the four-figure million-dollar commitments now flowing into PACs reveal that Silicon Valley and the Trump administration view the stakes as existential.

Financial Times reporting documents a cluster of newly formed super PACs, each bankrolled by major tech figures and founded specifically to mobilize voters around AI policy, raising a combined total that exceeds $360 million and dwarfs traditional issue-advocacy spending.

The central fault line is jurisdictional: whether individual states retain the right to regulate AI systems deployed within their borders, or whether the Trump administration’s framework concentrating all authority at the executive level will prevail.

This battle matters to institutional investors because regulatory fragmentation or consolidation directly determines compliance costs, market access, and systemic risk for the technology sector at large, and the outcome will almost certainly establish precedent for how other emerging technologies, including blockchain and digital assets, are governed in the United States.

Leading the Future raises $125 million from tech’s most prominent AI investors to block state regulation

Founded in August 2025, Leading the Future is the largest of the pro-AI super PACs and carries backing from a roster of names that reads like a map of AI capital concentration: OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and Andreessen Horowitz, one of the venture capital industry’s most influential firms.

The PAC explicitly targets pro-AI candidates who oppose state-level regulations, framing the issue as federal efficiency versus bureaucratic fragmentation. Its fundraising total of over $125 million represents the opening salvo in what industry insiders anticipate will be the most expensive technology-focused election cycle in American history.

Leading the Future’s positioning reflects a core tech industry consensus: that uniform federal rules, even if stringent, are preferable to a patchwork of 50 different state frameworks that would require separate compliance, litigation, and operational adjustments for each AI deployment.

However, the PAC’s formation also exposes fractures within the pro-AI coalition. Trump and his allies, including the newly formed Innovation Council Action PAC, have already begun attacking groups like Leading the Future for insufficient loyalty to the administration’s specific consolidation agenda.

The tension between “pro-AI” and “pro-Trump’s specific regulatory model” now splits the industry’s political spending into competing camps, signaling that Silicon Valley’s unified front on AI exceptionalism is fracturing along partisan lines.

Trump advisor David Sacks launches $100 million PAC to enforce federal regulatory consolidation

Innovation Council Action, founded and led by Trump communications aide Taylor Budowich and bankrolled by Trump advisor and PayPal executive David Sacks, represents a more militant faction within the pro-AI camp.

This PAC commits at least $100 million exclusively to supporting candidates who will implement Trump’s specific framework for concentrating AI regulatory power at the executive level, effectively stripping all 50 states of independent oversight authority.

The organization functions not merely as a pro-AI advocate but as a loyalty test: it explicitly aims to hold accountable policymakers who do not align with Trump’s consolidation agenda.

President Trump has made it clear, America will win the AI race against China, period. He built the framework, he’s leading from the front, and this organization exists to make sure he doesn’t fight that battle alone. The cavalry is coming to back up the policymakers who stand with the president and will hold accountable the ones who don’t.

Taylor Budowich, Innovation Council Action leader and former Trump communications aide

Budowich’s framing reveals the ideological underpinning of Trump’s AI consolidation strategy: positioning federal regulatory authority as essential to American competitiveness against China, and reframing state regulation as a liability to that competition.

This geopolitical argument provides political cover for what is fundamentally a federal power grab, and it has proven persuasive within the administration.

The existence of Innovation Council Action alongside Leading the Future demonstrates that the tech industry’s regulatory preferences have become entangled with the 2024 election result and Trump’s second term agenda in ways that make simple “pro-AI” or “anti-AI” labels obsolete.

For institutional investors, the emergence of Innovation Council Action signals that regulatory outcomes will be determined less by technical evidence or public input than by access to Trump administration officials and demonstrated commitment to the administration’s specific policy architecture.

Anthropic and Meta back competing state-level power, fragmenting tech’s regulatory strategy

Not all tech industry spending pushes toward federal consolidation.

Anthropic, one of the largest AI safety research labs, has established Public First Action, a PAC designed to raise $75 million to support candidates who preserve individual states’ rights to regulate AI. This positioning marks a sharp departure from the Leading the Future PAC’s framework and suggests that the AI industry itself is divided on the optimal regulatory structure.

Anthropic’s bet on state-level regulation reflects either a genuine commitment to localized governance or a strategic calculation that state regulation, while costly, is more navigable than federal control under Trump administration terms.

Meta, which has historically supported tech industry positions on reducing regulation, has launched the American Technology Excellence Project with an initial budget of $65 million directed toward state-level candidates positioned to “defend American tech leadership at home and abroad”, a euphemism for opposing AI regulation at the state level.

Meta’s parallel investment alongside Leading the Future’s mega-PAC suggests that the company views both federal and state-level advocacy as necessary and that defending tech autonomy requires spending at multiple levels of governance simultaneously.

The fragmentation of tech industry spending across three competing regulatory visions, Leading the Future’s federal light-touch model, Anthropic’s state autonomy framework, and Innovation Council Action’s Trump-aligned federal consolidation, creates genuine uncertainty about which regulatory architecture will prevail.

Institutional investors cannot assume that any single faction speaks for “Big Tech” on AI governance.

Instead, the 2026 midterm elections will likely determine whether AI regulation becomes a federally consolidated system under executive authority, remains diffuse across state jurisdictions, or settles into some hybrid model that reflects the outcome of competing multi-hundred-million-dollar spending campaigns.

The outcome of the 2026 midterm elections will directly determine whether the regulatory framework for AI, and, by extension, template precedent for blockchain and digital asset governance, is set by state legislatures, the Trump executive branch, or some combination of both. Institutional investors should monitor which specific candidates these PACs successfully back into office and track whether the Innovation Council Action’s explicit loyalty tests create a bloc of Trump-aligned federal AI regulators or whether Leading the Future’s coalition builders maintain enough moderate Republican support to block full executive consolidation. The open question: whether Trump’s stated commitment to federal AI authority will survive midterm results that may not align with his cabinet’s preferences, or whether the $100 million Innovation Council Action spending will prove sufficient to enforce party discipline on AI regulation among elected officials.