A political group funded in part by a $25 million donation from OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife is spending in at least 48 congressional races to elect candidates who support a single federal AI standard that would override state regulation, according to reporting carried by Fox News. The group, Leading the Future, promotes federal pre-emption, a policy that would stop states from passing or enforcing their own AI laws. OpenAI's rival Anthropic has taken the opposite side, giving at least $40 million to a political action committee opposed to pre-emption.
The split turns a policy disagreement into a well-funded electoral fight two weeks before the midterms. Leading the Future and an affiliated nonprofit back candidates who oppose what they call "heavy-handed" regulation and favor one national rule in place of the state-by-state patchwork that has emerged in the absence of federal legislation. Critics say the spending exposes a contradiction in how AI executives talk about safety.
That charge lands on Brockman directly. He has publicly called for AI safeguards even as the group his money helped fund campaigns against rules that could "unduly constrain or delay AI development." OpenAI said the donation was made in his personal capacity. "There are leaders in industry who want to pay lip service to regulation," said Charlie Blaettler of the Guardrails Alliance, a group formed to oppose Leading the Future.
The fight sits alongside a louder argument about how far public control should go. At a Detroit Economic Club event, Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed called for rebuilding AI companies as public-interest corporations with the government holding "about 50% of the value," framing it as protection for workers against AI-driven job losses. His Republican opponent Mike Rogers rejected it flatly: "I'll be damned if I'm going to let Detroit become a Democratic socialist city." The distance between those positions shows how unsettled the politics remain even inside a single race.
Voters, for now, lean one way. A New York Times/Siena poll released Wednesday found likely voters trust Democrats over Republicans to handle AI by 11 points, 48% to 37%, from a survey of 3,494 likely voters conducted 12 to 19 October. The result arrives as AI companies face scrutiny over safety, foreign sales and the technology's effect on jobs, and it gives the candidates Leading the Future opposes a reason to run on the issue rather than away from it.
The pre-emption question is the one with the longest reach. If a future Congress grants a single federal standard, the state laws now filling the vacuum, from California's transparency requirements onward, would be swept aside, and the companies writing the largest cheques would have helped decide which rules survive. AI Daily has tracked both Anthropic's push for a federal safety bill and the earlier scramble to regulate AI; the new element is the scale of money, more than $65 million between the two camps, now riding on the outcome of individual House and Senate seats.