Silicon Valley just found its new favorite hobby: buying congressional primaries. Marc Andreessen and Greg Brockman, backed by a super PAC called “Leading the Future,” spent roughly $29M on a single Democratic primary in New York’s 12th district. Their candidate won.
The race wasn’t really about New York politics. It was about whether AI regulation gets handled at the federal level, with a framework friendly to the industry, or left to a patchwork of state laws that tech companies view as an existential threat to their business models.
The money behind the machine
Leading the Future has raised somewhere between $50M and $125M from prominent tech donors. Andreessen and his a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz each donated $12.5M to the PAC. Greg and Anna Brockman matched that figure.
The PAC’s core argument is straightforward: the US needs a single national regulatory framework for AI, not 50 different state-level experiments that could slow development and hand competitive advantage to China.
