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Comments (94)

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  simonw
  > OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22mn in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53mn, according to federal disclosures.Never ceases to amaze me how cheap lobbying is. That's pocket change for these companies.
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  atlasunshrugged
  For technical minded US folks who read about this and are outraged and/or interested in how they can do more politically, I highly recommend checking out fellowship programs like TechCongress and Horizon which place technical experts in Congress for a year (disclosure, I'm an alum) and have become critical sources of expertise in a world dominated by nontechnical folks. TechCongress applications for next year closed, but I believe Horizon's are still open.https://techcongress.io/ https://horizonpublicservice.org/
• raspberryhead
  Lobbying should be illegal at this scale.
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  zombittack
  You would think if the general public actually wanted this, lobbying wouldn't be necessary. Call your reps. Let them know how you feel about intellectual property theft, wage theft, ecological impacts, and the intentional erosion of the voting power of the majority in modern democracy.
• SwellJoe
  Anthropic has been pretty transparent that their plan for dealing with Chinese open models is regulatory capture. All the fear-mongering and posturing that AI is so dangerous only they can be trusted with it. They want to legislate their competition away, at least in a few markets. OpenAI has been more subtle about it.It's a dangerous gamble, and bad for the US. But, given how cheaply many of our politicians can be purchased and how much money is flowing into the leading AI companies (and a bunch of also-rans), I guess we should expect to see them rolling the dice on that gamble.
• anon
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• dboreham
  This is axiomatic -- organizations are going to spend some proportion of the money they have to bribe politicians in their favor, modulo the RoI which will vary a bit case to case. Therefor the more money the organization has the more they're going to be bribing. AI companies at present have tons of money. Taken to the limit you get AIPAC.
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  ChrisArchitect
  Is anyone reading your endless ft.com posts?https://archive.ph/PASMJ
• mrloopex
  And this is after crypto bros spent record sums on lobbying 5 years ago.
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  shevy-java
  That's not new though. Washington succumbed to bribes decades ago already. It just is much more apparent now with the orange king and his billionaire bodies. The Epstein network must be much bigger than what is already known. It is also most likely still existing today, just with different actors. Billionaires want to party - often with people below a certain age ...
• tudou527
  [flagged]
• Kapura
  is that good
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  whatever1
  Everyone should be lobbying. It is the golden era of lobbying with 100% success rates. Whether you are in AI or the lettuce industry.