I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics

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I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics<br>0:00/1218.765488<br>1×

Listen to me read this post here (not an AI-generated voice!), subscribe to the feed in your podcast app, or download the recording for later.

I’ve been running my website Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked. Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products, regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence industry is following the same playbook.

Continuing to track only crypto would mean missing half the story. The same operatives are running both campaigns. Josh Vlasto, longtime adviser and spokesperson for Fairshake — the cryptocurrency super PAC network responsible for the bulk of crypto’s 2024 spending — is now simultaneously heading Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC network.1 Chris Lehane, the political consultant and Coinbase board member who helped establish Fairshake and famously told Coinbase employees who questioned whether a crypto voter bloc existed that they would simply invent one,2 is now also an OpenAI executive and one of the people behind the Leading the Future PAC network.3 The same venture capital firms are funding both: Andreessen Horowitz, a crypto heavyweight in the 2024 elections, is now splitting its political spending across crypto and AI PACs.

See Andreessen Horowitz’s activity on Tech Influence WatchThe PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people.<br>So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called Tech Influence Watch, and it documents more than $400 million (and counting) in contributions from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.

The site is live now at influence.citationneeded.news.a Here’s a little of what I found while building it.

The AI industry is fighting amongst itself<br>In New York’s rapidly approaching 12th Congressional District primary, two AI super PACs have spent nearly $10 million opposing each other. Think Big — backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI through the Leading the Future network — has spent $6.3 million trying to defeat Alex Bores, who has made tech regulation a pillar of his platform. Jobs and Democracy PAC — backed by Anthropic through the Public First network — spent around $3.5 million supporting him.<br>New York House District 12 electionThe policy rivalry mirrors a corporate one. OpenAI and Anthropic are two of the most prominent AI model developers, and direct competitors. OpenAI’s approach is essentially “don’t regulate us”. Anthropic, on the other hand, claims to champion “AI safety” and stricter regulations, offering its policies (and, by extension, its product) as the responsible alternative. While the companies and their respective super PACs frame the clash as a policy debate, from the outside it looks far more like tug-of-war between competitors trying to yank the regulatory environment in their direction.<br>But mostly, crypto and AI are coordinating<br>While AI PACs squabble, they’re still spending far more often alongside crypto money in the same races. So far, I’ve found 15 races where both industries are active, totaling $26.5 million. The most common pairing is, unsurprisingly, Fairshake and Leading the Future — the crypto and AI PACs that share operatives and are both substantially backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Defend American Jobs (the Republican arm of the Fairshake crypto PAC network) and American Mission (the Republican arm of Leading the Future) have spent together in seven races, always backing the same candidate.<br>With Vlasto and Lehane running operations for both, it seems unlikely this is coincidence. In most cases, the two PACs simply support the same candidates. But in others, they split their approach in ways that achieve the same outcome while obscuring the source of the money. In Illinois’ 2nd District, AI money supported one candidate while crypto money opposed their opponent. The different tactics still worked toward the same result, but masked the true scale of tech industry money shaping a race that will impact the lives of the district’s 730,000 residents.<br>The crypto playbook worked<br>The cryptocurrency industry’s 2024 spending helped...