The headline out of Washington this spring is that artificial intelligence has entered electoral politics. The quieter headline is that it arrived with a checkbook and no apology.
Two super PACs, one tied to Anthropic and one to the circle around OpenAI, are spending millions on the 2026 midterm elections. The exact figures, as is customary with entities that file with the Federal Election Commission only when they must, remain partly obscured. What is not obscure is the architecture: large sums, loosely disclosed, flowing toward candidates who will vote on the legislation that governs the companies writing the checks.
The representatives of these PACs called what they are doing a war. That is their word, not mine. “This is a war,” one operative told the Times. War is an interesting word for a process in which no one bleeds and everyone invoices.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, and a cohort who left OpenAI on the stated grounds of safety. OpenAI, which became a public-facing company under Sam Altman, has spent three years arguing in congressional testimony that it, too, is primarily concerned with human welfare. Both companies have positioned themselves as the responsible adults in a dangerous room. Now both are funding political operations whose explicit purpose is to shape which adults write the rules of that room.
This is not a scandal in the legal sense. Super PACs are legal. Undisclosed donor networks behind super PACs are legal. Technology executives meeting with senators are legal. The legality is precisely the point, because it means no one has to say plainly what is happening.
What is happening is that two of the wealthiest and most influential technology companies on earth are competing not only in the product market but in the market for congressional favor. The competition they have exported to the midterms is the same competition they fight in San Francisco and London and Brussels: who gets to define what safe AI looks like, and who gets to profit from that definition.
The voter in a contested House district in, say, Ohio does not know that the advertisement they are watching was paid for by people whose primary interest is a depreciation schedule and a favorable regulatory sandbox. The operative who called this a war knows the voter does not know. That asymmetry is the product.
Dario Amodei testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in May 2025 that AI regulation should be “careful and evidence-based.” Sam Altman, before the same committee in 2023, said the stakes were “very high” and invited oversight. Both statements are in the congressional record. So is the fact that both companies are now paying to determine who sits on the committee that would do the overseeing.
The FEC filing deadline for the third quarter of 2026 is October 15th.