Leading the Future, the biggest pro-AI super PAC network, is walking away from the midterm elections with just over $20 million still in the bank and a roster of dozens of successful congressional candidates from both sides of the aisle.
At first glance, that looks like a win. The details tell another story, though. The donations went overwhelmingly to safe candidates, and the results in the small handful of riskier races that Leading the Future got involved with indicate that its plans to shape the election fell flat.
When Leading the Future first entered the scene in August 2025 vowing to "oppose policies that stifle innovation," it had a war chest of around $100 million thanks to some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech billionaires—including Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and OpenAI's Greg Brockman—and was led by major political strategists.
Designed as a "structured ecosystem," it set a goal of having "maximum flexibility to engage in the 2026 election cycle and beyond." The network is made up of 501(c)(4)s, and federal and state super PACs catering to both sides of the aisle: American Mission largely gives to Republicans, while Think Big largely gives to Democrats. Its structure and overlapping strategists quickly drew comparisons to Fairshake, a massive, well-funded pro-crypto super PAC network that dominated in the 2024 election.
"They came out guns ablazing, saying be afraid, we are going to spend our millions to influence not only how lawmakers legislate us but also against you in your primaries and in your re-election," Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, tells WIRED. "The purpose of that was to bully lawmakers into acquiescence, intimidate them into not sticking their necks out on AI safety or tech industry regulation at all."
Leading the Future did not respond to requests for comment.
Late last year, Leading the Future took on Democrat Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer and state lawmaker running in New York's 12th congressional district on an AI safety platform, spending millions of dollars in attack ads against his primary bid.
"They fully expected to bury him, put his head on a spike and parade it around as proof that they could," says Haworth. Instead, Bores' candidacy became a high-profile proxy war between competing AI philosophies, boosting his profile and platform. The pro-AI safety network Public First, which has significant financial backing from Anthropic, spent $15 million boosting Bores' candidacy. Though Bores didn't win, he came second in a crowded primary field to another candidate, Micah Lasher, who campaigned on tech accountability and AI safety.
Leading the Future spent about $26 million in independent expenditures on the primaries alone. But spending tapered off as it headed into the general election, as the network dropped about $10 million in total while overwhelmingly backing candidates in safe races. Its funding also dropped off, with the network reporting zero donations in the second and third quarters.
The strategy seems to have shifted around the same time that stark polling began coming back showing widespread distrust of Big Tech and cronyism in Washington, DC. (An NBC exit poll found that 56 percent of voters said AI and data centers played a "major" role in their vote.)
Backing safe candidates was, simply put, "an influence play," says Haworth. "They're trying to ingratiate themselves with incoming members of Congress."
The co-founder of Public First Action says that the midterms marked a victory for AI safety. "Voters in both parties delivered the same verdict tonight," says Brad Carson. "This is a crushing blow to the AI industry's anti-regulatory efforts to buy a Congress that would look the other way."
Results weren't great in the riskier races that Leading the Future jumped into.
One of its biggest bets was on Darline Graham, the sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham, who was an incumbent running to serve a full term in South Carolina. Graham earned the moniker "Data Center Darline" from her Democratic opponent Annie Andrews due to her enthusiastic support of AI and data center expansion. American Mission donated more than $2 million to Graham, who ultimately lost with 46.5 percent in a state that last elected a Democrat to the Senate in 1998.
Of the other toss-up House races that Leading the Future weighed in on, almost all were in support of Republican candidates through the American Mission super PAC. The exception was Democratic Florida representative Jared Moskowitz's re-election campaign, which it funded through Think Big. Moskowitz won by 13,000 votes against challenger Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton.
In North Carolina's 1st congressional district, Leading the Future through American Mission backed Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel who served as an assistant secretary of defense working on cyber policy under president Donald Trump in 2025, in her primary. Guardrails Alliance, another player in the AI safety network, backed her opponent, Democrat Don Davis, who previously co-sponsored a bill which would limit tax giveaways for data center development. Davis won.
Leading the Future also backed Aaron Flint, a retired combat veteran, conservative commentator, and former state director for Republican representative Ryan Zinke, who was running in Montana's first congressional district. Flint conceded to his Democratic opponent Sam Forstag, a Democratic wildland firefighter who landed endorsements from major progressives including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and advocated for strict federal oversight of AI. (The Associated Press has yet to call the race.)
American Mission Florida, a state-level super PAC in the Leading the Future network, got $3 million in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. While both Donalds and opponent David Jolly took nuanced approaches to the AI safety issue, they diverged strongly on the issue of data center expansion, with Donalds opposing statewide bans or moratoriums on data centers.
After Tuesday night, Silicon Valley will be bracing for what's expected to be a reckoning over the expansive power and freedom they've enjoyed thus far during Trump's second term. Democrats have vowed to bring Big Tech bosses to Capitol Hill for hearings. Senator Ron Wyden signaled what's to come in a pithy statement on X. "Subpoeanas," he wrote.
