While coverage of AI money flowing into the mid-terms has mainly focused on the huge sums going into super PACs such as Leading the Future and Public First, individual donations direct to campaigns from employees of AI companies and organisations have largely flown under the radar.
That’s despite the unusually large scale of these individual donations, and their ability to directly boost the campaigns of their chosen recipients in a way the super PAC money can’t. Such ‘hard money’ donations could be AI safety’s secret weapon in the 2026 midterms.
The most significant inflows come from Anthropic employees who appear to be backing candidates such as Alex Bores and Scott Wiener that favor stricter AI guardrails than their competition. According to a Transformer analysis of FEC data, Anthropic employees are listed as the source of 302 donations totaling more than $880,000 by the end of the first quarter of this year, an average of more than $12,500 per employee donating.
Employees of OpenAI have also been donating, but at a smaller scale. In total, they are listed in filings totalling more than $300,000 across 162 donations. Many of the largest donors appear to work in areas related to AI safety.
