The Biggest Pro-AI Super PAC Network Spent Big and Lost the Races That Mattered

Leading the Future, the largest pro-AI super PAC network, is leaving the midterm elections with more than $20 million still sitting in the bank — and a losing record in nearly every competitive race it entered.

On paper, the network backed dozens of winning congressional candidates from both parties. The details undercut that headline. Its money went overwhelmingly to safe seats. In the small handful of risky races it actually contested, the results suggest its plan to shape the election fell flat.

The story matters well beyond one PAC's scoreboard. Silicon Valley's biggest donors built this machinery to deter AI regulation in Congress, and the midterms were its first real test of whether tech money could buy the policy environment it wanted.

How did a $100 million war chest shrink to this?

When Leading the Future launched in August 2025, it vowed to "oppose policies that stifle innovation." It started with roughly $100 million from some of Silicon Valley's most powerful figures — including Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and OpenAI's Greg Brockman — and veteran political strategists at the top.

The network described itself as a "structured ecosystem" built for "maximum flexibility to engage in the 2026 election cycle and beyond." Its architecture mirrored the pro-crypto super PAC network Fairshake, which dominated the 2024 election. It is composed of 501(c)(4) organizations plus federal and state super PACs serving both parties: American Mission gives largely to Republicans, Think Big largely to Democrats.

Critics saw the design as an intimidation campaign from the start.

"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, told 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.

What happened in the Alex Bores primary?

The network's first big display of force backfired. Late last year, it spent millions of dollars in attack ads against Alex Bores, a Democrat, former Palantir engineer, and New York state lawmaker running in the state's 12th congressional district on an AI safety platform.

"They fully expected to bury him, put his head on a spike and parade it around as proof that they could," Haworth said.

Instead, the race became a high-profile proxy war between competing AI philosophies. Public First, a pro-AI-safety network with significant backing from Anthropic, spent $15 million boosting Bores. He didn't win, but he finished second in a crowded primary field behind Micah Lasher, who also campaigned on tech accountability and AI safety.

The failed takedown wasn't cheap. Leading the Future spent about $26 million in independent expenditures on primaries alone.

Why did the spending stop?

The money dried up as the general election approached. The network dropped about $10 million in total during that phase, concentrating on safe races. It reported zero donations in the second and third quarters.

The retreat coincided with stark polling on public attitudes toward the industry. Voters showed widespread distrust of Big Tech and of cronyism in Washington, DC. An NBC exit poll found 56 percent of voters said AI and data centers played a "major" role in their vote.

Backing safe candidates was, in Haworth's words, "an influence play."

"They're trying to ingratiate themselves with incoming members of Congress," she said.

Who won the AI-safety side's argument?

Brad Carson, co-founder of Public First Action, read the midterms as a referendum the industry lost.

"Voters in both parties delivered the same verdict tonight," Carson said. "This is a crushing blow to the AI industry's anti-regulatory efforts to buy a Congress that would look the other way."

Which risky bets went wrong?

The network's biggest single bet failed. American Mission donated more than $2 million to Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, an incumbent running for a full term in South Carolina. Her Democratic opponent, Annie Andrews, dubbed her "Data Center Darline" for her enthusiastic support of AI and data center expansion. Graham lost with 46.5 percent of the vote — in a state that last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1998.

The other toss-up House races followed a pattern:

• North Carolina's 1st district: 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 AI-safety-network player, backed her opponent, Democrat Don Davis, who had co-sponsored a bill limiting tax giveaways for data center development. Davis won.
• Montana's 1st district: The network backed Aaron Flint, a retired combat veteran, conservative commentator, and former state director for Republican Representative Ryan Zinke. Flint conceded to Democrat Sam Forstag, a wildland firefighter endorsed by major progressives including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who advocated strict federal oversight of AI. The Associated Press has yet to call the race.
• Florida's 1st-district-adjacent exception: Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz's re-election was the one risky Democratic bet, funded through Think Big. He won by 13,000 votes over Scott Singer, the former mayor of Boca Raton.

At the state level, American Mission Florida received $3 million to support Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. Both Donalds and his opponent, David Jolly, took nuanced positions on AI safety, but they split sharply on data centers — Donalds opposed statewide bans or moratoriums on data center expansion.

What comes next for Silicon Valley in Washington?

After Tuesday night, the industry faces a reckoning over the expansive power and freedom it has enjoyed during Trump's second term. Democrats have vowed to summon Big Tech bosses to Capitol Hill for hearings. Senator Ron Wyden previewed the approach in a pithy post on X: "Subpoenas."

For a network built to intimidate lawmakers out of regulating AI, the lesson of 2026 is sobering: the $100 million arsenal bought safe-seat goodwill, but it lost nearly every fight where the outcome was genuinely in doubt — and the incoming Congress knows it.