The megadonors financing the US midterms to influence policy

Big money has always influenced American politics, but this November the US midterm elections will mark the most expensive election in US history, more than President Donald Trump's entire 2024 election campaign. And part of the reason for that is because there is a rising political power throwing its weight around, the AI industry. So who are the groups funding these midterm campaigns and what are they hoping to influence? More than 10 billion dollars has been spent so far on campaigning ahead of the midterm elections on November 3rd. And that total is projected to hit 11.6 billion dollars before it's all over. Some of the U.S.'s richest people and corporations are behind that record spending. And with their money, they expect to have the power to reshape the race for Congress. Corporations and their political action committees, known as PACs, spent a record 517 million dollars on House and Senate races in the 15 months through to March 2026. Big Tech is one of those mega donors. More specifically, companies developing artificial intelligence. Political groups backed by the two biggest AI developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have spent around $55.7 million. That's just what they spent directly on campaign advertising. But they've also donated millions more to bigger groups, collectively as much as $431 million. dollars. Some of the donors include SpaceX founder Elon Musk, Google's co-founder Sergey Brin, and Meta. But companies can't just write a check to a candidate or give it directly to them, so they use what's called super PACs. A super PAC is a type of political committee can accept unlimited amounts of money and run ads for or against anyone independently, as long as it doesn't coordinate those ads with any particular campaign. Some money goes through dark money non-profits, which don't have to disclose who the donors are the thing is these industries don't pick a team they're backing whoever supports their policies regardless of whether they're republican or democrat for example leading the future a super PAC aligned with OpenAI spent money on both republican and democratic groups but why spend so much money the short answer is that they want to say in how AI gets regulated in other words these mega donors want to be able to influence how any bill is written as for ordinary voters while many of them oppose the proliferation of AI data centers but President Trump had this to say about AI there's going to be a tremendous self-policing aspect so the obvious question is do voters stand any kind of chance of getting what they want when they face off against the deep pockets of big tech