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.
