At least one in six members of the next Congress are all but certain to have made it there with the backing of the crypto industry or artificial intelligence interests.
A smattering of super PACs representing factions from those sectors spent a whopping $127 million across more than 100 primaries this year in an effort to shape the future of Congress — and won roughly 90 percent of them.
It’s a major influence play from a set of political players that went from not existing four years ago to being among the biggest spenders so far this cycle.
But behind the headline track record, the outcomes are more nuanced: Many of the groups’ victories were in effectively uncontested races in which they backed incumbents who did not face serious primary challenges.
In Republican primaries, the groups had a near-perfect track record, in large part because they usually aligned with endorsements from President Donald Trump. In Democratic contests, their records were more mixed: They racked up plenty of wins but also lost some high-profile races when they were up against each other or other moneyed groups — or when their spending itself became an issue in the race.
“Campaign finance is in such a Wild West, uncharted territory, and wealth is so obscene that they can spend this kind of money on politics,” said Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley-based Democratic consultant. “So I think we’re in truly deeply uncharted territory.”
The rapid growth of tech money aiming to influence politics and policymaking has created a complicated constellation of groups. Fairshake, a pro-cryptocurrency super PAC primarily funded by Coinbase, Ripple Labs and the venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz, launched in the 2024 cycle and funds two other super PACs, one each supporting Democrats and Republicans.
Then came the AI super PACs this cycle, including Leading the Future, a pro-AI group funded by major industry executives including OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, which also backs both parties through two other super PACs. And Public First Action, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit whose backers include the firm Anthropic and bills itself as an AI regulation-focused counterweight to Leading the Future, helps fund two super PACs of its own.
And there are a smattering of other smaller PACs that spent in primaries too.
“Super PACs play a huge role in American politics, and not for the good,” said former Rep. Brad Carson (D-Okla.), who co-founded Public First Action last year. “The innovation that we had at Public First was rather than just complain about Leading the Future having a super PAC, we were like, ‘OK, we will regrettably fight fire with fire.’”
The eye-popping spending comes as voters and party leaders continue to grapple with the emerging technology, with battles over AI regulation and data centers front and center ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The super PACs have scaled up quickly as the industries have grown rapidly and created a new class of tech billionaires flush with cash they can spend on politics. The new spenders largely have not fallen along traditional partisan or ideological lines, but sought to boost lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that they see as aligned with their legislative interests — or oust those who have gone against their priorities.
“For our organization, we said we were going to show up and show up at scale, and we did,” said Josh Vlasto, who worked for Fairshake last cycle and now helps run Leading the Future, the network of super PACs funded by AI executives and investors that advocates for the expansion of the technology.
“We wanted to show up for candidates in primaries, particularly ones that were being attacked on issues related to AI or had a really strong position on AI,” he said.
For most of the groups, the primaries are expected to just be a warmup. Fairshake and its affiliates had just shy of $123 million in the bank at the end of July, according to the most recent campaign finance reports. Last cycle, that network of crypto groups spent $87 million across more than two dozen House and Senate races for the general election.
Among the group’s wins: A Fairshak-network PAC put $12 million behind GOP Rep. Barry Moore’s Senate campaign, seeing him through a six-way primary after Trump also endorsed him. The crypto group also helped boost Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) in a member-on-member primary against Rep. Al Green, and also got its preferred candidates to replace two retiring Democrats, with Adrian Boafo winning the primary for Rep. Steny Hoyer’s seat in Maryland and Jasmine Clark set to replace the late Rep. David Scott in Georgia.
“We’re just getting started building the largest pro-crypto Congress in history,” Fairshake spokesperson Geoff Vetter said in a statement.
Most of the races where the groups spent heavily in primaries will not be competitive in the general election, meaning the candidates that made it through are all but certain to be in Congress next year. Just over half of candidates who got a boost from cryptocurrency or AI-linked super PACs in their primaries were running in open seats, while a bit over 40 percent were incumbents and a handful were challengers.
The vast majority of incumbents easily win their primaries, and those who got backing from crypto or AI groups largely also won by healthy margins, making it hard to attribute their victory to the PACs. One notable exception was Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.), who warded off a primary challenger by roughly 1 percentage point after getting $1.6 million in backing from Jobs and Democracy PAC, a Public First affiliate.
Some of the biggest losses for both the cryptocurrency and AI groups came in their highest-profile races where they spent the most — and where the fact they were spending at all also became itself a campaign issue.
In Michigan’s 13th District, Rep. Shri Thanedar, a vocal cryptocurrency proponent, lost his seat despite Fairshake’s $2 million spent in the race. In Illinois, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi lost a Democratic Senate primary despite nearly $10 million in spending from Fairshake. (His opponent, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, slammed him for being supported by a “MAGA-backed crypto PAC.”)
“If they’re spending against you, you are in a good position for reelection because you’re clearly where popular opinion is,” said Teboe, the Silicon Valley-based Democratic strategist.
No race attracted as much tech money and attention as New York’s 12th District, where Jobs and Democracy PAC and two smaller groups came head-to-head with Think Big, a Leading the Future affiliate. The four groups combined spent nearly $25 million, with Think Big opposing New York Assemblymember Alex Bores’ campaign, while the other three groups supported him.
Bores, who had championed the Raise Act, an AI safety and regulation bill in the state Legislature, ultimately lost to Micah Lasher — though Lasher is also an AI critic, making the result hardly a win for the industry. The race and AI-backed spending also significantly raised Bores’ profile as a critic of the industry.
“Lasher is a co-sponsor of the Raise Act and harsher on the AI sector than Alex Bores was, and by choosing to fight in New York City, and making it their mission to destroy Alex, they made him into a national hero,” said Carson, who leads Public First, the group behind Jobs and Democracy PAC.
The Manhattan congressional race also laid bare the competing goals of the dueling AI-backed super PACs. Public First focuses on advocating for AI regulation, Carson noted, arguing that it should be excluded from POLITICO’s tally of crypto and AI spending. The group is bankrolled in part by $40 million in donations from Anthropic.
Bores described the AI industry’s political spending this cycle as a new effort to persuade public opinion that immediately fell flat with voters.
“Social media came on the scene and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, Arab Spring! It’s gonna lead to democracy! It’s gonna save the world!’” Bores said in an interview. The AI industry “started from the jump, realizing they were deeply, deeply, deeply unpopular, and the only way that their policy choices would be implemented is if they could drown out the voice of the American people with money.”
The Leading the Future affiliates spent in nearly a dozen primaries since New York, winning all of them. The groups boosted candidates including Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), who faced a progressive primary challenger in a seat altered by redistricting, and Democrats Jeremy Moss and Dan Koh in open seats in Michigan and Massachusetts, along with Republicans such as South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham and Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, who is running for Senate.
Compared to hotly contested general elections, which can attract tens of millions in spending for House races and hundreds for Senate races, primaries are relatively affordable for outside groups, said Rich Barton, a senior research fellow at Unite America, a group that advocates for reforms to the primary process. Still, the scale of the spending seen in some of the open-seat primaries this year was new.
“There’s not a precedent for the more than $10 million that we’ve seen a single entity spend in a single primary,” Barton said.
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