As market actors, AI companies are all doing something pretty similar, to similar ends, with similar needs: building models at great expense and trying to market them to users and sell them to customers. There’s a lot of uncertainty about where their collective project is going, of course, but on a basic level, they’re all trying to get access to the same resources — compute, data, and engineering talent — to climb the same curve, and to turn their models into something they can charge for.

As political actors, though, they’re drifting in different directions. In the last two years, some of them (OpenAI, Meta, and xAI) publicly aligned with the Trump administration, while others steered away (Anthropic, though a legal dispute with the Department of Defense; DeepMind, through leaders who spoke up about ICE shootings). Recently, and more intentionally, they’ve been asserting themselves as political donors and lobbyists. This spending, which has been ramping up in recent months, suggests that the people running AI firms actually want considerably different things from the political system. It also suggests that some of their own employees think they’re crazy.

It’s helpful to work back from some recent news. Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei donated $1 million of his own money to Public First, a super-PAC created to “educate Americans on key AI issues and advance an AI policy agenda supporting safeguards,” including model transparency requirements, a federal AI-governance framework, export controls on AI chips, and regulation around catastrophic AI risks. As a company, Anthropic had previously given $20 million to Public First Action, though this was purportedly earmarked for “public education,” not direct political contributions. (Public First recently spent big to support Democratic pro-AI-regulation candidate Alex Bores in an unsuccessful run for Congress in the midtown Manhattan district, but it also supports Republicans who have spoken out in support of AI regulation — or at least for........

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