Anthony Levandowski closed his AI-focused church, Way of The Future, in 2020 and donated the church's ~$175K funds to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
Kirsten Korosec / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
When Anthony Levandowski founded Way of the Future, the AI church was the era's signature gesture of AI-as-worldview advocacy. Its quiet end — closed in 2020 with the kind of sum that today wouldn't cover a rounding error of Leading the Future's war chest — marks how far the industry's influence spending has traveled.
The corpus shows where the money went instead: Anthropic's $20M to the guardrails-focused Public First super PAC, OpenAI employees' $215K+ to Guardrails Alliance, and Andreessen and Horowitz's $25M to the pro-AI Leading the Future. Levandowski's ~$175K to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund closes out the symbolic phase; his successors are buying political structure directly.
First-order effects
- The NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund receives roughly $175K as Way of the Future formally dissolves, redirecting its assets from AI-religious advocacy toward civil-rights legal work.
- The most visible non-corporate, non-PAC vehicle for AI ideology disappears, leaving no equivalent of the church in the current landscape.
Second-order effects
- The influence-spending vacuum left by informal vehicles like the church has been filled at two orders of magnitude larger scale by super PACs on both sides of the AI-rules fight — Leading the Future versus Public First and Guardrails Alliance.
- Companies and their employees are now the donors of record, which means AI policy positioning is increasingly priced into corporate budgets rather than treated as founders' personal conviction projects.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AI governance becomes a structurally funded political battleground, with industry-aligned PACs on both sides institutionalizing what earlier founders expressed through symbolic acts — a shift from worldview marketing to lobbying infrastructure.
The trend: AI industry influence spending is migrating from small symbolic vehicles like Levandowski's church to formal, multi-million-dollar super PACs arrayed on both sides of the AI-regulation fight.