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Companies like Anthropic are powering a new election spending boom that’s just as deceptive and destructive as anything the pro-Israel lobby has done.

A screenshot from an AI-funded ad in support of North Carolina congressional candidate Valerie Foushee.

Corporate and right-wing lobbies in American politics are like hydras: When one head is cut off, two appear in its place. That’s why taking one lobbying giant down is not enough—and why we always have to keep our eyes out for new forces trying to distort our democracy.

Right now, the biggest lobbying boogeyman on the street is undoubtedly AIPAC. As popular opinion around Israel undergoes historic transformations, the pro-Israel lobby has become increasingly toxic, with unprecedented numbers of congressional candidates refusing to take its money. AIPAC has had to resort to using shell PACs and covert tactics to stay relevant. That is a direct result of our movement’s organizing against and exposing AIPAC and its allies through coalitions like Reject AIPAC.

This is undoubtedly a victory for our democracy and the fight against Big Money in politics. But even as AIPAC’s influence begins to fade, new lobbies are embracing its flood-the-zone strategy in primary elections to make mass inroads for corporate agendas.

In 2026, a new giant has surfaced, one sitting at the crossroads of some of our most important policy fights on affordability and foreign policy: the AI lobby. Like AIPAC, and the crypto lobby, which emerged around the same time that AIPAC began ramping up its campaign spending in 2022, the AI lobby has burst onto the scene in this cycle by spending millions of dollars in primaries. And like AIPAC, it is largely doing so by using opaquely named super PACs and flooding the airwaves with ads that don’t mention AI at all.

Through new super PACs, AI corporations like OpenAI (Leading the Future, Think Big, and American Mission PAC), Meta (Forge the Future Project, Making Our Tomorrow, American Technology Excellence Project, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California), and Anthropic (Jobs and Democracy PAC and Defending Our Values PAC) are all spending millions of dollars to influence our elections and AI policies.

While each corporation tries to convince us they are the good ones, they are all opposing candidates promising to take on the AI lobby like Nida Allam in North Carolina and Junaid Ahmed in Illinois. They are turning our elections into a for-profit pissing match between Big Tech billionaires.

The first AI primary fight of the cycle came in North Carolina’s Fourth Congressional District. Anthropic’s super PAC, Jobs and Democracy PAC, spent over $1.6 million in the final week of the race to boost incumbent Representative Valerie Foushee over progressive primary challenger and Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam. Foushee was appointed by Hakeem Jeffries to the Democrats’ commission responsible for creating a framework to regulate AI—and then was bankrolled by the very lobby she was supposed to create guardrails around.

None of the pro-Foushee ads mentioned AI; instead, they........

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