AI Money Floods the 2026 Midterms: Who Gets to Write the Rules?

Commentators in the piece describe deep public unease about AI. One speaker says poll after poll shows widespread anxiety about what AI will mean for people's futures. That includes fear of losing jobs and fear of losing autonomy, along with what the speaker calls "bigger existential anxieties about the elite imposing technologies on the rest of us." Another commentator notes that this sentiment is coinciding with the populist undercurrent they say has defined these midterms.

That unease shows up in physical opposition. One reporter notes that NIMBYism and pushback against data center construction are growing in the United States, "at least for now." Protest footage outside OpenAI's offices includes chants accusing the "AI lobby" of "buying and selling our politicians."

The report says political leadership on the issue has been scattered and divided. Clips set phrases like "self-regulation" and "regulatory void" next to competing framings. One voice frames AI as a race with China in which "whoever wins AI wins." Another calls it "the largest industrial revolution in history" and urges everyone to work together. A third mentions calls for international standards set through global cooperation between governments. One speaker admits they don't know where AI is going and doubts that "presidents and CEOs really know." Several commentators describe a fight over who writes the rules of AI. One calls it "a battle for the soul of the AI industry."

According to the report, this midterm is not only the most expensive midterm ever but the most expensive U.S. election ever, with well over $11 billion spent on advertising. Part of that spending comes from new AI super PACs that are spending heavily in primary elections. The report says AI-aligned political groups have raised close to $300 million for the midterms.

Critics frame this as unlimited corporate money potentially outweighing the voices of ordinary Americans. One commentator says sarcastically, "Nobody panic. American democracy will totally survive the bottomless money pit of AI campaigning, right?" Another predicts it will change elections forever.

The commentators also explain the strategy. One says the companies have realized it is very hard to get legislation through Congress, so they have turned to the electoral process to elect members who will be sympathetic to their agenda. Another explains that the real way to influence Congress is to intervene in primaries and elect candidates from safe districts who will be friendly to your agenda.

One reporter frames the conflict as the classic pro-regulation versus deregulation debate between government and industry. The two biggest spenders both call themselves "pro-AI," but the reporter says "if you look under the hood a little bit, there is a big difference." One side wants very light-touch federal standards. The other wants sweeping AI safety guardrails.

The first group is Leading the Future, which the report says claimed to have raised $140 million to back pro-AI candidates who oppose sweeping regulations or guardrails. A speaker presenting that side's case argues for a national regulatory framework rather than a "piecemeal" state-by-state approach. They warn that without such a foundation, "not only is China going to win the race, but then they're going to be calling the plays."

The report says Leading the Future's fundraising success prompted a rival super PAC that favors stricter guardrails. Brad Carson introduces his group, Public First Action, as "a direct response to try to fight back against Leading the Future." According to the report, Public First Action has received significant backing from Anthropic, an estimated $83 million overall. Carson says the group is active in both Democratic and Republican races nationwide. Its aim is to support people who believe AI should serve the public interest, not work against it.

One commentator argues that these sums are small relative to what is at stake. They say the industry is putting a trillion dollars into building data centers this year, and probably hundreds of billions more into AI companies. Against that, "a hundred million is nothing to safeguard that investment." In this speaker's view, if the industry can shape rules that benefit it, the return on that investment is huge.

Another speaker notes that "advertising is literally a hundred percent of what they're spending," which in politics is called persuasion spending. The report adds that AI itself is now among the tools used to persuade voters. It briefly mentions Senator Jon Ossoff in the context of AI making it cheaper and easier to produce content that is hard to distinguish from reality.

The report notes that persuasion in politics is nothing new and draws a comparison to Big Tobacco. In a clip, a speaker accuses the industry of saying it wants federal regulation rather than state regulation while fighting all federal regulation. The speaker also accuses it of saying it doesn't want young people to smoke while quietly encouraging them to, and of promising to take responsibility for its product while doing everything possible to avoid liability. The report presents this as a historical parallel to the AI industry's claim that it wants a national framework.

One commentator offers a blunt reading of what this kind of spending is for. They say the goal is not to persuade lawmakers of how good the industry is. Instead, "you're trying to show them that you have power to spend money and influence the outcome of their election."

The report traces much of this power to the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which it says opened the floodgates to unlimited political spending. One commentator says there have long been worries about what the ruling would mean for corporate influence, "but we're really seeing it now." Another notes that since Citizens United, every election has been more expensive than the last.

The report calls 2024 the most expensive election up to that point. It says that cycle taught a young industry how to turn great wealth into unprecedented political influence. That industry was crypto. Its super PAC, Fairshake, raised a huge amount of money from the industry and spent big. One commentator says this was when the tech industry became more directly involved in Washington politics and realized that lobbying shapes the future of regulation or deregulation. Another sums up the approach: "Flood the zone, attack candidates that you disagree with, knock them out of office. This is the crypto playbook."

The report says the AI lobby has tried to use the crypto playbook, but that AI is different. One speaker says the industry "didn't recognize that the American people care a lot more about AI than they ever did about crypto."

A reporter explains the difference in more detail. Crypto was relatively easy because the industry agreed on the regulations it wanted. AI, by contrast, affects every single person, including people's neighborhoods and the country's physical infrastructure. The reporter adds that there is no clear dividing line between Democrats and Republicans on the issue: "Everything is thrown out the window." In this reporter's view, lobbying can make an impact, but the bigger challenge, and the "bigger battleground," is convincing the public that AI will improve everyone's lives and not just the lives of a small group.

That battleground is local. The report says AI companies are arriving in ordinary towns and "putting shovels in the ground" to build data centers, and that this is proving far more controversial than some first expected.

On a tour, a local resident points to land that used to be woodlots and is now next to townhomes. They say residents were told the land would become something like a shopping center, but "instead, they get data centers," and they point out how close the buildings are to the homes. A commentator explains that data centers in people's backyards are linked in the public mind to environmental damage, water use, and rising electricity bills. The resident calls a nearby facility "a monstrous electrical substation" and says pushback is growing.

The report highlights Roger Yackel and other residents who fought a project that would have included more than 35 data centers on nearly 2,000 acres near Manassas National Battlefield Park. Yakel says the case went to the court of appeals, which voted unanimously to throw the project out. "So, we had that success," he says, adding: "Bring your data centers to Mars and put them in there. We don't need any more here."

A commentator draws the lesson. Even if the industry spends hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to shift the political headwinds, they say, "if data centers are an unpopular topic or if people are anxious about losing their jobs, I don't know if money necessarily solves that problem."

The report also notes that AI investment has become an important driver of U.S. economic growth. It says the industry has tried to respond to public concern, in some cases by urging federal regulation, while CEOs pledge to address the technology's risks and rein in soaring power costs. But as AI's footprint grows, the report says, pressure for government action is only increasing, especially at the state and local level. One commentator warns that even the most basic proposals are controversial to many lawmakers and predicts "a long protracted effort to find consensus."

The industry also disagrees with itself about the way forward and how serious AI's problems are. The report features a researcher, named in the transcript as Jacob Coxon and described as a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher, who quit over fears about where AI is heading. "On the current path, I think it is more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs and it could end in human extinction," the researcher says.

The report ends on the question it opened with. Commentators describe two very different visions of how the industry should operate and ask who gets a seat at the table. One raises the concern that letting AI companies lead too closely on their own regulation is "the fox guarding the hen house." The narration acknowledges that how much and what kind of regulation AI needs are hard questions. It suggests the hardest balance may be deciding whom the rules benefit most: the industry or the people.

The final speaker puts the issue as a choice. They ask whether corporate spending will determine the future of AI regulation in the United States, or whether politicians will be able to "stake out their own positions based on what their constituents want." The report leaves that question open.