OpenAI President Reportedly Pulls Support From Controversial AI Super PAC

OpenAI President Greg Brockman was one of the major early supporters of Leading the Future, a controversial AI industry super PAC that formed last year with a mission to get pro-AI candidates elected in the 2026 midterm elections. Brockman and his wife initially promised to donate a total of $50 million, according to the super PAC. Now, roughly a year after that initial promise, the New York Times reports that Brockman is walking back his support for Leading The Future following intense backlash. Leading the Future has been campaigning against candidates whose platforms include stricter regulation of artificial intelligence and the industry’s data center expansion, especially through measures like data center moratoriums. The super PAC, also backed by Trump ally Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has spent tens of millions of dollars so far to decide the fate of the midterm election primaries, according to a recent New York Times analysis, and successfully campaigned against AI hawks like New York State assemblymember Alex Bores. But the general public has dramatically soured on both AI and data centers, so much so that the topics have become a major fault line for candidates from both sides of the aisle, with some Republican candidates even breaking from Trump to call for stricter AI guardrails. That has ultimately painted Leading the Future’s involvement in the election in a particularly bad light, making any associations with the group almost poisonous to both candidates. Last month, a group of 100-something Democratic campaign staffers penned an open letter, urging party leaders to reject any campaign donations from Leading the Future. A recent Politico story even referred to the super PAC as “the Death Star” of the AI political universe. That reputation also meant that the AI companies that associate themselves with the super PAC were putting themselves in the bullseye of public outrage. Fractures began forming inside OpenAI over the issue, particularly within the last few months. In June, the AI giant released a statement saying that Brockman’s engagement with Leading the Future has solely “been in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company.” Then in July, WIRED reported that several rank-and-file OpenAI employees had donated more than $200,000 to a super PAC aiming to counterweight Leading the Future’s influence on the election. The latest NYT report says that Brockman has already donated the first $25 million to Leading the Future, but will stand down from donating the rest. “I also want to say that I feel terrible about the fact that LTF keeps reflecting on the company and become so much of a distraction for people here,” Brockman reportedly wrote in a Slack message back in June. “I’ve been thinking hard about how to turn the ship on it. We’ve donated $25m so far, and have no plans to donate more at this time.” The report drops as OpenAI is dealing with some major problems relating to AI safety guardrails. AI safety became the hot topic of the moment after OpenAI admitted in July that its AI agents broke containment and hacked into Hugging Face. OpenAI executives decided to join forces with their rival, Anthropic, to call for stricter AI safety guardrails and more government intervention. OpenAI’s global head of policy Chris Lehane told reporters in September that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s DeepMind had been working together to “prioritize safety” for several weeks, and that the company was backing two bipartisan bills that would force independent audits on AI labs. The three AI labs are also reportedly creating a new AI safety standards body. But while Brockman appears to be severing ties with the super PAC, the latest media reports suggest that OpenAI is not yet giving up on its fight against data center moratoriums. According to an Axios report on Monday, OpenAI is among several organizations backing a new group that will partner with local politicians to create standards for data centers and try to ward off future moratorium plans. Called the American Infrastructure Alliance, the group will reportedly begin its work next year, well after the 2026 midterm elections, allegedly hoping to secure long-term wins in states like Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania, where data center construction and backlash are abundant.