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Money in politics now ranks as the number one national problem for American voters across the spectrum, according to polls, with the US public increasingly feeling as if it has been stripped of its political agency by wealthy donors.
Though Donald Trump will in all likelihood face an unprecedented backlash in November’s midterms, even voters turning out for the Democrats say they don’t trust the opposition to take on the ‘pay to play’ political system.
Crypto and AI have been channelling unprecedented sums – more than $520 million – into a vast political influence campaign striving to buy industry allies in both parties this midterm cycle.
These are not popular industries.
Crypto is increasingly linked to fraud. Meanwhile, the AI industry is non-consensually encasing the nation in resource-guzzling data centres, while issuing alarming apocalyptic threats about people’s livelihoods and futures.
A recent paper by the Institute for New Economic Thinking warns that if the Democratic Party wins Congressional power and regresses to the status quo of corporate patronage rather than addressing economic precarity and inequality, there could be yet another – possibly even more extreme – right-wing populist backlash.
$520m
The amount crypto and AI have been channelling into a political influence campaign this midterm cycle
$40m
The FairShake crypto PAC network spent millions to defeat crypto skeptic and Democrat Sherrod Brown
“Most ordinary people are really unhappy, really frightened, and really squeezed, especially on healthcare – and if you’re trying to access higher education, good luck to you,” says Thomas Ferguson, the Institute’s research director and one of the paper’s authors.
“The Democratic Party is essentially a split-level show at the moment,” he explains – contrasting the affordability and “labour-oriented” grassroots wing characterised by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani; and the influential ‘old guard’ Democrats who he says have strong, longstanding ties to corporate America and Silicon Valley in particular.
Tech largely ‘went red’ in the early 2020s, but it’s now “taking on many hues”.
“A block of the industry is going blue again,” Ferguson believes – as parts of Silicon Valley, in essence, are finding willing partners in a certain faction of the Democratic Party.
Crypto and AI’s spending push at the midterms has filtered through opaque unlimited funding vehicles known as Political Action Committees (PACs).
Where crypto’s spending has skewed towards Republicans (62-38%); AI spending has focused more on Democrats (61-39%).
The playbook – pioneered by crypto – is centred around rewarding industry allies and brutally punishing candidates that stand in the way of the industry’s preferred regulatory landscape.
The FairShake crypto PAC network spent $40 million to help defeat outspoken crypto skeptic and Democrat Sherrod Brown in 2024 – and has dropped at least another $30 million this cycle to fight his return to Congress.
It serves as a disciplining mechanism for any candidate in either party thinking of standing against the industry.
“You could say that crypto bought a powerful position within the Democratic Party,” Thomas Ferguson says. In 2025, 18 Senate Democrats crossed the aisle to help Trump pass the GENIUS Act, an agreeable regulatory package for Stablecoins (such as Tether). Almost all 18 of them benefited from multi-million-dollar interventions by crypto SuperPACs such as FairShake.
Now, Big AI is following the same strategy.
Leading the Future (LTF), a key pro-AI PAC network which has taken cash from OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, is explicitly modelled on FairShake.
The pair share donors – notably the previously Trump-aligned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz – as well as personnel. Josh Vlasto (former press secretary to Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) holds leadership roles in both networks.
There is also the Public First Action PAC network, which has taken more than $40 million from OpenAI rivals Anthropic, the creator of Claude. The group purports to advocate for stricter AI regulation than its rivals at LTF. But critics, such as software engineer and tech journalist Molly White, argue that it is “self-serving lobbying framed as principled advocacy” – an effort to “shape regulations that will benefit their businesses at the expense of everyone else”.
Both big money networks fund ads that have nothing to do with their donors’ products.
In one extreme case, Leading the Future paid for ads against Democratic New York House candidate Alex Bores criticising him for his past work at Palantir – despite the fact that LTF itself is partly funded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
Politico revealed that Democratic consultants have urged candidates in competitive seats to stay quiet on AI for fear of being targeted by the PACs.
More Conflicts of Interest
The United Nations’ ‘independent’ AI panel has financial and personnel ties to OpenAI and Anthropic – the firms building the technology it was created to assess, Nafeez Ahmed reports.
The panel’s latest briefing largely echoed recent statements by AI firms that the “safeguards designed today” may fail “once agents can understand them and plan around them”.
Yoshua Bengio, the panel’s co-chair, advised OpenAI and now leads LawZero, an AI organisation supported by funders of OpenAI and Anthropic. Kevin Kohler worked for a think tank funded by the philanthropic network that built both AI giants – an affiliation omitted from the panel’s July report which Kohler co-authored.
“Mitigation measures” including “recusal from specific discussions” were agreed – according to an online FAQ that a UN spokesperson confirmed was updated in response to Byline Times’ questions.
Frenzy and Safety
What distinguishes AI is that the industry is embroiled in an insular feud between ‘effective accelerationists’ and ‘effective altruists’.
The debate between offshoots of esoteric Silicon Valley ideology, both sides entrenched in science-fiction and pseudoscience, is elaborate and longstanding. But it went mainstream with the recent resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon.
Dubbed a ‘whistleblower’ by the bulk of the mainstream press, Coxon warned that the industry was “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.
Unlike most traditional whistleblowers, Coxon provided no leaked evidence or receipts. But his intervention has helped fuel panic about a Terminator-style apocalypse which has in turn led many to call for a regulatory response.
Where Trump has sided with the ‘accelerationists’ who believe that the United States must build super-intelligent AI unfettered by regulation to get there before China, a number of the Democratic Party’s leading lights have taken up the mantle of ‘AI safety’.
Both sides of the debate are backed by factions of the industry itself, and take for granted that current Language Language Models (the flagship software of the generative AI boom) will inevitably improve exponentially.
A Byline Times investigation by Nafeez Ahmed was not able to find publicly available data to support the idea of ‘recursive self-improvement’ – machines building smarter and smarter machines. It found that the far likelier disaster scenario has to do with the company’s absurdly over-leveraged financial situation and inability to turn a profit – facts which Anthropic’s position, disclosed in its recent IPO, have borne out.
But a number of credulous media reports about AI agents (autonomous software programmes) supposedly ‘going rogue’ and hacking into various organisations have fed the frenzy about self-aware AI in recent months.
Anthropic has even started considering whether Claude has “some kind of consciousness or moral status”, and whether its product should be endowed with rights. Critics say this is nonsense.
“It is essential for law-makers and the public to understand that none of the reported incidents actually involved loss of control at any time, or arguably even ‘rogue agents’, or any kind of humanlike agency on the part of AI models,” writes Professor of Computer Science Melanie Mitchell. “The blame lies with the humans who failed at engineering safe testing conditions, and who train AI models using methods that incentivise high persistence, autonomous decision-making, and reward hacking.”
Too Big to Fail, Again
Top Democrats are getting involved in the debate.
Barack Obama and Kamala Harris have publicly backed Project Blueprint – an initiative to get AI executives in the room with the politicians writing the industry’s rules.
It is housed inside Democratic mega-donor Ron Conway’s venture capital firm – Conway has also backed Leading the Future with $100 million – and led by former Obama press secretary and Amazon executive Jay Carney.
House Leader Hakeem Jeffries has launched a new commission designing the Democrats’ AI safety policy “in partnership with the innovation community” – packed with representatives who have benefited from the industry’s PAC spending at this election.
“A past Democratic elite with a highly questionable record on financial reform is now re-emerging on the scene with the support of many – if not all – of the tech industry,” Thomas Ferguson says. “They’re offering a weak, inadequate, industry-friendly regulatory settlement as the responsible alternative to Trump’s near-total deregulation.”
Ferguson worries that the Democrats’ regulatory plans could entrench rather than constrain the AI giants: protecting them from liability, limiting competition through rules around cheaper open-source models and licensing, and handing oversight to national security institutions with a “veil of secrecy” that would make meaningful public scrutiny difficult.
Invoking former Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, Ferguson also emphasises that there are already existing consumer protection laws that could be enforced to hold AI companies accountable for the damage they have caused.
Perhaps most concerning to Ferguson – and a rising chorus of others – is about what happens when the AI boom turns bust.
Sam Altman of OpenAI has argued that the US Government should serve as the industry’s “insurer of last resort” – prompting familiar concerns that Big AI will be deemed ‘too big to fail’.
Ferguson puts it bluntly: “It appears that the same Democrats who coddled the banks after 2008 are now offering to turn the same trick for tech. Their big weapon, as always, is money.”
Yet, there are real alternatives on offer in the party.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wants major AI firms brought under democratic control, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for protecting consumers and workers from a possible AI-induced economic collapse.
The Great Recession, and the Obama administration’s role in bailing out Wall Street, is often credited with incubating the discontent behind right-wing populism. Ferguson warns that, if both parties patronise Silicon Valley and fail to curb its excesses, history has a real risk of repeating itself. ●
This article appears in the current print and digital edition of the Byline Times monthly magazine.