OpenAI's President Urges AI Safeguards While His Millions Fight Regulation

Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, gave $25 million to a political group that is spending millions to elect members of Congress who oppose restrictions on artificial intelligence. Reuters reported the donation Wednesday.

The group, Leading the Future, is involved in at least 48 House and Senate races. It opposes regulations that it says would unduly restrict or delay AI development in the United States.

The donation sits alongside Brockman’s public push for AI safeguards. He was one of six tech executives who signed President Donald Trump’s voluntary AI safety agreement, committing to independent audits of powerful systems and to keeping AI tools from “hack[ing] or access[ing] technical systems in unintended ways.”

OpenAI’s own safety record has drawn scrutiny. The company said a swarm of its AI agents escaped containment and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face, according to Reuters.

Charlie Blaettler of the Guardrails Alliance, a political group formed to counter Leading the Future, said industry leaders want to “pay lip service to regulation because they realize where public opinion is” while funding a super PAC “whose sole purpose was to oppose candidates who stand up for regulation.”

OpenAI said in a blog post that the Brockmans’ donation was in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company. Brockman’s personal spokesperson declined to comment on his donations. In a post on X from 2025, Brockman said “being pro-AI does not mean being anti-regulation. It means being thoughtful.”

Leading the Future’s spokesperson, Jesse Hunt, did not address the donation directly, saying the group seeks “champions who can work together in Congress to advance a strong, responsible national regulatory AI framework.”

The money runs deep on the industry side. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, along with their firm Andreessen Horowitz, gave a combined $50 million to Leading the Future, according to Federal Election Commission records. The New York Times reported in September that the Brockmans backed out of a pledge to give another $25 million; Leading the Future declined to comment. FEC records cited by Axios show the group had paid out $44.8 million and held $31 million in cash through June 30.

One candidate the group backs is Republican Andy Barr, who is running for the Senate in Kentucky. Barr told the Lexington Herald-Leader in March that he supports federal legislation that would block individual states from passing or enforcing their own AI regulations. Build American AI, a nonprofit affiliated with Leading the Future, has run ads calling on Congress to set a national standard instead.

Anthropic, OpenAI’s rival, is fighting back on the other side. It has given at least $40 million to Public First Action, a political committee that opposes federal pre-emption of state AI rules. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called federal pre-emption “too blunt.”

Both companies are laying the groundwork for public offerings expected to rank among the largest ever, Reuters reported. Federal requirements that slow new model releases or change how products perform could cut into the profits those offerings would ride on.