Paying for Power: Inside Big Tech’s AI Super PAC Midterm Strategy
Big Tech companies have aggressively flooded Washington with lobbying dollars aimed at rewriting legislation and wooing lawmakers to look the other way. But this is only part of the story.
Love Adu is a policy intern focused on technology reform. Her work at Issue One centers on liability, transparency, kids’ online safety, and artificial intelligence.
In March, after reviewing thousands of pages of discovery, a Los Angeles jury delivered a landmark verdict — the first in what is expected to be nearly 2,000 cases in the Superior Court alone — finding Meta and YouTube liable for harming young people and deliberately designing their platforms to be addictive. The day before, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for endangering children.
Big Tech immediately understood that this could be the beginning of the end of its era of unaccountable dominance. The industry is now in full damage-control mode after some of the worst defeats it has ever suffered.
Companies like Meta, Alphabet, and OpenAI have aggressively flooded Washington with lobbying dollars aimed at rewriting legislation and wooing lawmakers to look the other way. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, 11 leading social media and artificial intelligence companies pumped a combined $20 million into federal lobbying operations during the first three months of 2026 — an average of about $226,000 per day. New filings reviewed by Issue One show that six of the biggest tech, social media, and AI companies — Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube), Anthropic (the AI company behind chatbot Claude), Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), Microsoft, AI chipmaker Nvidia, and OpenAI (the AI company behind ChatGPT) — hired a total of 307 lobbyists during the first quarter of 2026.
But the federal lobbying surge is only the visible layer. Beneath it, Big Tech has built a parallel political infrastructure: a network of multi-million-dollar super PACs designed to shape Republican and Democratic primaries and lock in influence across every level of government.
Meta, for example, now operates more than $65 million distributed between at least four separate super PACs: Forge the Future, Making Our Tomorrow, the American Technology Excellence Project, and Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California. All have operated with minimal public visibility, and several were never announced, only surfacing through federal disclosures.
Leading the Future, which has raised more than $125 million and is backed by major tech executives and investors, has similarly stood up at least three separate PACs: Build American AI, American Mission PAC, and Think Big PAC. The company’s American Mission arm has spent over $1.2 million in Republican primaries in Texas and North Carolina, while Think Big has backed Democrats in Illinois and has pledged millions to influence the New York midterms.
The industry knows Americans have serious, personal concerns about how AI will shape their lives — from their children’s wellbeing, to the security of their jobs, to the real-world costs of data center construction. But rather than engaging those concerns directly, tech companies have sidestepped them.
Instead, Big Tech has learned to co-opt issues voters care most about like national security, immigration, and economic security and use them as political cover. For tech, the goal is not to demonstrate good-faith commitments, but rather to use interest groups against each other to avoid accountability and industry safeguards.
In Texas, for example, Leading the Future ran a bait-and-switch campaign, backing Republican Chris Gober, not as an AI candidate, but as a “MAGA warrior” committed to American technological investment and defeating China. The ad never mentioned artificial intelligence, and it offered no indication that the PAC behind it had a direct stake in avoiding AI regulation.
In New York, Meta’s Think Big deployed the same approach against state Assemblyman Alex Bores, the author of a law that requires major AI companies to publish safety plans and report critical incidents. The PAC pledged to spend $100 million in the state’s midterms and ran ads falsely claiming Bores profited from “building and selling the tech for ICE, enabling the agency, and powering their deportations.” Meta’s PAC took advantage of an issue that resonated deeply with voters in New York and used it as political fodder to protect their bottom line.
Taken together, Big Tech’s tactics have left voters worse off and less informed. Instead of a transparent debate about AI — its risks, tradeoffs, and need for guardrails — voters are presented with a distorted version of reality where core policy questions are buried beneath emotionally charged proxies like national security and immigration.
In 2025, the industry pushed aggressively for federal preemption — attempting to block states from regulating AI and protecting their residents from scams, deepfakes, sexual exploitation, price-fixing, and more. That effort failed in Congress, stalling amid bipartisan resistance to stripping states of their authority without replacing it with meaningful federal safeguards.
In 2026, their PAC strategy is centrally focused on buying the votes needed to kill legislation and stave off accountability for their industry. When one sector can pour hundreds of millions into elections while simultaneously shaping the rules that supposedly govern it, the basic balance of power changes in its favor. Voters are not just being persuaded by good-faith actors, they are being outspent race after race on issues they often don’t even see clearly presented.
It’s time that tech money is treated as toxic in American politics. What Big Tech’s spending is ultimately doing is simple: it is attempting to buy time, influence, and unparalleled protection for the industry at exactly the moment courts, states, and the public are closing in.
the LA jury verdict against Meta for harming kids shows why we need regulation. tech response is spend more on PACs. Bores says no.
307 lobbyists hired by six tech companies in Q1 alone. imagine what Congress looks like when industry spends more on influence than people spend on votes.