Companies like Anthropic are powering a new election spending boom that’s just as deceptive and destructive as anything the pro-Israel lobby has done.
A screenshot from an AI-funded ad in support of North Carolina congressional candidate Valerie Foushee.(YouTube)
Corporate and right-wing lobbies in American politics are like hydras: When one head is cut off, two appear in its place. That’s why taking one lobbying giant down is not enough—and why we always have to keep our eyes out for new forces trying to distort our democracy.
Right now, the biggest lobbying boogeyman on the street is undoubtedly AIPAC. As popular opinion around Israel undergoes historic transformations, the pro-Israel lobby has become increasingly toxic, with unprecedented numbers of congressional candidates refusing to take its money. AIPAC has had to resort to using shell PACs and covert tactics to stay relevant. That is a direct result of our movement’s organizing against and exposing AIPAC and its allies through coalitions like Reject AIPAC.
This is undoubtedly a victory for our democracy and the fight against Big Money in politics. But even as AIPAC’s influence begins to fade, new lobbies are embracing its flood-the-zone strategy in primary elections to make mass inroads for corporate agendas.
In 2026, a new giant has surfaced, one sitting at the crossroads of some of our most important policy fights on affordability and foreign policy: the AI lobby. Like AIPAC, and the crypto lobby, which emerged around the same time that AIPAC began ramping up its campaign spending in 2022, the AI lobby has burst onto the scene in this cycle by spending millions of dollars in primaries. And like AIPAC, it is largely doing so by using opaquely named super PACs and flooding the airwaves with ads that don’t mention AI at all.
Through new super PACs, AI corporations like OpenAI (Leading the Future, Think Big, and American Mission PAC), Meta (Forge the Future Project, Making Our Tomorrow, American Technology Excellence Project, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California), and Anthropic (Jobs and Democracy PAC and Defending Our Values PAC) are all spending millions of dollars to influence our elections and AI policies.
While each corporation tries to convince us they are the good ones, they are all opposing candidates promising to take on the AI lobby like Nida Allam in North Carolina and Junaid Ahmed in Illinois. They are turning our elections into a for-profit pissing match between Big Tech billionaires.
The first AI primary fight of the cycle came in North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District. Anthropic’s super PAC, Jobs and Democracy PAC, spent over $1.6 million in the final week of the race to boost incumbent Representative Valerie Foushee over progressive primary challenger and Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam. Foushee was appointed by Hakeem Jeffries to the Democrats’ commission responsible for creating a framework to regulate AI—and then was bankrolled by the very lobby she was supposed to create guardrails around.
None of the pro-Foushee ads mentioned AI; instead, they portrayed Foushee as an anti-Trump, anti-ICE fighter. They also failed to mention that Allam (who was backed by Justice Democrats, with whom I work, along with other progressive groups) favored a federal ban on new AI data centers, while Foushee opposed a ban. Foushee wound up winning the race.
This is exactly the sort of pay-to-play politics that voters are so fed up with and exactly the point of the AI lobby’s influx of spending this cycle.
Affordability and forever wars will be at the center of every election this year. The future of AI policy plays a central role in both of these fights.
No matter what votes they take or tweets they post, any candidate backed by AI super PACs is complicit in Trump’s warmongering and the facilitation of US imperialism abroad. Despite media narratives praising Anthropic for standing up to the Trump administration, Trump used Anthropic’s Claude model to plan and conduct 1,000 strikes on Iran—including the elementary school bombing that killed over 100 children. Before that, Claude was used to help the Trump administration kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and conduct a military coup in the country. In the midst of all that “fighting with the Pentagon,” Anthropic even dropped its flagship safety policy that it said differentiated it from companies like OpenAI.
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
In these dark times, independent journalism is uniquely able to uncover the falsehoods that threaten our republic—and civilians around the world—and shine a bright light on the truth.
The Nation’s experienced team of writers, editors, and fact-checkers understands the scale of what we’re up against and the urgency with which we have to act. That’s why we’re publishing critical reporting and analysis of the war on Iran, ICE violence at home, new forms of voter suppression emerging in the courts, and much more.
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At home, AI corporations are trying to evade responsibility for the harm their data centers cause to communities across the country. Research clearly shows that AI data centers raise utility rates for the areas they’re in through their massive consumption of electrical power. They also use inordinate amounts of water to cool their computers, threatening access to water and raising bills, while poisoning the air with toxic pollutants.
Numerous localities have successfully organized to prevent proposed data centers from coming to their districts, and some have been able to pass local moratoriums on the construction of any new data centers. Unsurprisingly, the AI lobby would rather not have too many politicians representing these views in the halls of Congress. It bears reminding that the data centers that power Crypto mining create the same resource constraints and cost increases for surrounding communities, which is exactly why many of the billionaires funding Crypto super PACs are also funding the AI super PACs.
These AI corporations are raising our utility costs and facilitating forever wars that nobody wants. Not to mention that they are coordinating with Palantir, which is powering ICE’s terror, threatening the future of jobs and entire industries, being used to harass people with deepfakes and disinformation, endangering children online, and using racially biased algorithms.
Like AIPAC and Crypto, AI super PACs are an existential threat to our democracy, and we should all be united in opposition to their involvement in our elections. The left should view all three of these lobbies the same, because they are. These are right-wing lobbies, pushing right-wing interests, to protect their own bottom lines, and they are doing so by electing the weakest Democrats in the bluest seats.
The left is admittedly behind on coming together for real policy solutions and regulations to ensure that AI is being used to serve the interests of the people, not the billionaire class. We cannot let AI super PACs guide that conversation.
A starting point is supporting Bernie Sanders’s national moratorium on AI data centers. We can put a pause on Big Tech billionaires’ accelerating construction across the country and harming our communities, and take stock of what the harms are and how we can prevent them in the first place. Eventually, we should nationalize the AI industry. If we want to truly turn it into a public good, it should be owned by the public and not a handful of billionaires in Silicon Valley.
As we build a more robust policy framework on the left, our progressive agenda broadly becomes even more important to ensure that our basic needs are treated like human rights, particularly when our livelihoods are under attack. For instance, if we cannot stop corporate greed, we can at least ensure that people have universal, free healthcare through Medicare for All if they lose their jobs, or their poisoned air leads to higher rates of disease like COPD, or all their other bills increase. A Green New Deal with a federal jobs guarantee is our first line of defense to ensure that every community has clean air, available water, and well-paying jobs despite AI’s threats. When we put an end to bottomless Pentagon budgets, we can stop sending billions in profits to these AI corporations whose technology is being used for America’s war machine. And if we raise taxes on billionaires, we can ensure that Big Tech pays its fair share to serve the basic needs of everyday people nationwide.
AI is not only not going away but is doubling down on strategies that AIPAC and Crypto have spearheaded in our elections. So be warned: The AI PACs are here, and they are a threat to us all. The hydra has grown another head. We must organize accordingly.
Usamah AndrabiUsamah Andrabi is the communications director for Justice Democrats.