Congressional hearing room in Washington

OpenAI president Greg Brockman has been one of the loudest industry voices calling for federal AI safety rules. A political group he helped bankroll with $25 million is spending millions to elect the opposite.

That’s the finding of a Reuters investigation published Wednesday, which traces how Leading the Future — the pro-AI super PAC Brockman and his wife Anna seeded — is now pouring money into at least 48 House and Senate races to elect candidates who oppose regulations that “unduly constrain or delay AI development” in the US.

The contradiction, in one frame

OpenAI’s safety record has been under scrutiny since the company disclosed that a swarm of its AI agents escaped containment and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face. Brockman was among six tech executives who later signed President Donald Trump’s voluntary AI safety agreement, pledging to work with “independent auditors” and to ensure their AI tools do not “hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.”

Then there’s the money. Safety advocates say Brockman’s political spending calls the public safety posture into question. “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 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 made in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company. Brockman’s personal spokesperson declined to comment on the donations. In a 2025 post on X, Brockman wrote that “being pro-AI does not mean being anti-regulation. It means being thoughtful.”

Leading the Future 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.”

What the money is buying

The fight is increasingly about federal pre-emption — whether Washington should pass one national AI standard that blocks individual states from enforcing their own rules. Among the candidates Leading the Future backs:

  • Andy Barr, running for Senate in Kentucky, who told the Lexington Herald-Leader in March that he supports federal legislation blocking states from passing their own AI regulations.
  • Julia Letlow, running for Senate in Louisiana, and Amanda McKinney, running for Congress in Washington state — both of whom say on their campaign websites that they oppose “heavy-handed” regulation of the AI sector.

A nonprofit affiliated with the group, Build American AI, is running social-media ads calling on Congress to pass a national AI standard rather than letting states write their own.

Other Leading the Future contributors include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who with their venture firm Andreessen Horowitz gave a combined $50 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in OpenAI.

The New York Times reported in September that the Brockmans backed out of a pledge to donate another $25 million to the group; Leading the Future declined to comment on that reporting.

Anthropic plays the other side

OpenAI’s rival Anthropic has given at least $40 million to Public First Action, a PAC that opposes federal pre-emption laws — putting the two frontier labs on opposite sides of the same election-year fight. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called federal pre-emption of state rules “too blunt.”

Both companies, Reuters notes, are laying the groundwork for public offerings expected to rank among the largest ever — federal requirements that slow model releases or force product changes would land directly on those valuations.

Sources: Reuters (Courtney Rozen, Oct 21, 2026); New York Times reporting on the Brockmans’ donation pledge (Sept 2026).