Pro-AI Super PAC Network Spent Big but Its Risky Bets Didn't Pay Off

Leading the Future, the largest pro-AI super PAC network, leaves the midterms with just over $20 million in the bank and a roster of winning congressional candidates from both parties. On paper, that looks like a strong finish. The details are less flattering. Most of the money went to candidates who were already safe bets, and the handful of genuinely competitive races the network entered don't show a group that could move outcomes.

A big launch, a layered structure

The group arrived in August 2025 promising to "oppose policies that stifle innovation," with a war chest of around $100 million. The backers read like a Silicon Valley roll call: Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and OpenAI's Greg Brockman, among others. Major political strategists led it.

The setup was deliberately layered. The network combines 501(c)(4) organizations with federal and state super PACs. American Mission mostly backed Republicans, while Think Big mostly backed Democrats. That mix, along with overlapping strategists, drew quick comparisons to Fairshake, the crypto-industry network that dominated spending in 2024. Structure is one thing, though. Whether a network can translate it into wins is the question that matters.

The Bores test

The clearest test came in New York's 12th district. Late last year, Leading the Future spent millions on attack ads against Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer and state legislator running on an AI safety platform. Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, describes the thinking behind that move: "They fully expected to bury him, put his head on a spike, and parade it around as proof that they could."

That's not what happened. Bores became the center of a proxy fight between competing AI philosophies. Public First, a pro-AI safety group with significant financial backing from Anthropic, spent $15 million supporting him. He finished second in a crowded primary field to Micah Lasher, who also ran on tech accountability and AI safety. The attack raised Bores' profile rather than sinking him, and the race ended up as a referendum on the industry's own tactics. Here's the thing: a super PAC that spends heavily against a candidate and still watches that candidate become a national talking point hasn't achieved much deterrence.

Spending that faded into safe territory

Leading the Future put about $26 million into independent expenditures in the primaries alone. As the general phase approached, the spending pulled back. The network dropped roughly $10 million in total, and what remained mostly backed candidates in races that weren't close. Fundraising slowed too, with the network reporting zero donations in the second and third quarters.

Haworth reads the pattern as deliberate. Backing favorites, in her view, is "an influence play. They're trying to ingratiate themselves with incoming members of Congress." That's a plausible interpretation. A group that wins the seats it was always going to win can claim a perfect record while spending little political capital on the fights that would have tested it.

The public mood may have made that retreat easier to justify. NBC News data found that 56 percent of respondents said AI and data centers played a "major" role in how they chose a candidate. That's a striking number for an issue that rarely topped voter priorities even a few years ago. Brad Carson, co-founder of Public First Action, framed it bluntly: "Voters in both parties delivered the same verdict tonight. This is a crushing blow to the AI industry's anti-regulatory efforts to buy a Congress that would look the other way." Treat that as a partisan read of the results, but the underlying signal about public skepticism of Big Tech is harder to dismiss.

Where the riskier bets landed

The results were rougher in the races where the network actually took on exposure. Its biggest single bet was Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham, who was running for a full term in South Carolina. Her Democratic opponent, Annie Andrews, nicknamed her "Data Center Darline" over her enthusiasm for AI and data center expansion. American Mission donated more than $2 million to Graham, who lost with 46.5 percent. South Carolina hasn't sent a Democrat to the upper chamber since 1998, so the loss stands out as a sign of how much the issue cut into a conservative base.

Most of the other competitive House races the network weighed in on backed Republicans through American Mission. The exception was Florida Democrat Jared Moskowitz, whose reelection Think Big funded. Moskowitz won by about 13,000 over Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton.

In North Carolina's 1st district, American Mission backed Republican Laurie Buckhout, a retired Army colonel who worked on cyber policy in the Trump administration. Guardrails Alliance, another group in the AI safety network, supported her opponent, Democrat Don Davis, who had cosponsored a bill to limit tax breaks for data center development. Davis won.

In Montana's 1st district, the network backed Aaron Flint, a retired combat veteran and former state director for Republican Ryan Zinke. Flint conceded to Democrat Sam Forstag, a wildland firefighter who earned endorsements from progressives including Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and has pushed for strict federal oversight of AI. The Associated Press had not yet called the race at the time of reporting.

Florida's governor race offered a different kind of test. American Mission Florida, a state-level PAC in the network, put $3 million behind Republican Byron Donalds. Donalds and Democrat David Jolly both took nuanced positions on AI safety, but they diverged sharply on data centers. Donalds opposes statewide bans or moratoriums on them. That split is the kind of issue-level contrast where a well-funded group can either shape the debate or find itself on the wrong side of voter sentiment, and here the evidence points toward the latter.

What comes next

The fight is shifting to Capitol Hill. Democrats have vowed to bring Big Tech executives in for hearings, and Senator Ron Wyden signaled the mood with a one-word post on X: "Subpoenas." Oversight pressure would test whether the industry's political spending buys the access and goodwill that Haworth describes.

My read: Leading the Future's record suggests that money alone doesn't guarantee influence over AI policy, especially when the issue has become unpopular with a broad slice of the public. The network still holds $20 million and a set of relationships with newly elected members. Whether that becomes leverage or a liability will depend on how those members respond when the hearings start.