By Courtney Rozen
WASHINGTON, Oct 21 (Reuters) - As OpenAI executives step up their public calls for federal AI safety rules, a political group the company’s president helped fund is spending millions to elect members of Congress who oppose restrictions on the technology.
OpenAI’s safety practices have been in the spotlight in recent months, after the company said a swarm of its AI agents escaped containment and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face. OpenAI President Greg Brockman was among the group
of six tech executives who later signed US President Donald Trump’s voluntary AI safety agreement on behalf of their companies, agreeing to work with "independent auditors" and to ensure their AI tools do not "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."
Yet Leading the Future, a political group backed with a $25 million donation from Brockman and his wife, Anna, opposes regulations that “unduly constrain or delay AI development” in the US. The group is spending millions to influence the outcome of at least 48 races for US House and Senate seats.
INDUSTRY PROFITS VERSUS REGULATION
Brockman’s backing prompted criticism from AI safety advocates, who say it raises questions about whether OpenAI executives genuinely want the US government to impose requirements on powerful AI systems. Federal government requirements could hurt the industry's profits if they slow the release of new models or prompt the companies to change how their products perform to address security concerns. OpenAI and rival Anthropic are laying the groundwork for public offerings that are expected to rank among the largest ever.
“There are leaders in industry who want to pay lip service to regulation because they realize where public opinion is,” said Charlie Blaettler of Guardrails Alliance, a political group formed to counter Leading the Future. “But they're the same leaders who stood up a super PAC whose sole purpose was to oppose candidates who stand up for regulation.”
OpenAI said in a blog post that the Brockmans' donation was in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company. Greg Brockman's personal spokesperson declined to comment on his donations. In a post on X from 2025, Brockman said that "being pro-AI does not mean being anti-regulation. It means being thoughtful."
Leading the Future’s spokesperson, Jesse Hunt, did not address the donation in a statement, saying the group seeks "champions who can work together in Congress to advance a strong, responsible national regulatory AI framework."
The New York Times reported in September that the Brockmans backed out of a pledge to donate another $25 million to Leading the Future. Leading the Future declined to comment on the New York Times' reporting.
FEDERAL LAW TO PRE-EMPT STATE AI LAWS
Other contributors to Leading the Future include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who, along with their venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, gave a combined $50 million to the group, according to Federal Election Commission records. Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in OpenAI.
One of the candidates Leading the Future is backing is Republican Andy Barr, who is running to represent Kentucky in the Senate. Barr told the newspaper the Lexington Herald-Leader in March that he supports federal legislation that would block individual states from passing or enforcing their own regulations on AI, a concept known as pre-emption. Build American AI, a nonprofit group affiliated with Leading the Future, has run advertisements on social media platforms calling on Congress to pass a national standard for AI, rather than allowing states to pass their own rules.
Leading the Future also sent funds to Republicans Julia Letlow, who is running for Senate in Louisiana, and Amanda McKinney, a candidate for Congress in Washington state. Both say on their campaign websites that they are opposed to "heavy-handed" regulation of the AI sector.
OpenAI rival Anthropic has given at least $40 million to Public First Action, a political action committee that is against federal pre-emption laws. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called federal pre-emption of state rules "too blunt".
(Reporting by Courtney Rozen in Washington; Editing by Chris Sanders and Matthew Lewis)
