Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has raised $125M+ in 2025, including from a16z and Greg Brockman, to try to shape the US midterms and federal AI regulation
Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has raised more than $125 million to try to shape the 2026 midterms and the future of federal AI regulation.
Context & Ripple Effects
Leading the Future began as a pro-AI political network backed by a16z, Greg Brockman and others, with more than $100 million in initial funding. Its subsequent $10 million media campaign for a national AI policy shows that the effort is moving from fundraising into direct pressure on Congress.
The group’s war chest also prompted plans for a counter-network backing AI-regulation-focused candidates, making AI policy a more explicit electoral spending contest rather than solely a lobbying debate.
First-order effects
- Leading the Future can fund materially larger midterm advocacy and candidate-support efforts while pressing for federal AI rules, strengthening the political voice of its pro-AI backers.
- Candidates and federal policymakers face a better-funded organized constituency arguing against a state-by-state regulatory patchwork.
Second-order effects
- Pro-regulation groups are likely to devote more resources to fundraising and electoral organizing to counter the pro-AI spending advantage.
- AI companies, investors and trade groups have greater incentive to coordinate around federal-policy positions, since election outcomes could affect whether national rules displace divergent state approaches.
Third-order effects
- If this competition persists, AI regulation could become a durable campaign-finance arena, with policy influence increasingly concentrated among well-capitalized technology interests and their organized opponents.
- The contest may accelerate pressure for a federal AI framework, but it does not determine its direction: electoral spending can amplify competing priorities rather than produce consensus.
The trend: AI policy is becoming state-mediated industrial politics, with frontier-tech capital funding electoral organizations to shape the regulatory environment.