Employees at Anthropic and OpenAI are donating to political campaigns at rates that dwarf every previous tech donor cohort, according to a San Francisco Standard analysis of FEC filings published July 18.
Roughly 59 of every 1,000 Anthropic employees have donated to a federal campaign during the current midterm cycle, nearly triple the rate of Airbnb employees during their first post-IPO cycle and five to six times that of Facebook and Google employees in equivalent periods. OpenAI’s participation rate is lower but still exceeds all three historical comparators, the Standard reported.
Coordination and Scale
The donations are notable for their synchronization. In October, 28 employees from Anthropic and OpenAI donated a combined $173,000 to congressional candidate Alex Bores in a single day, with 24 giving the legal maximum of $7,000. Two days later, 12 of those donors gave to California state senator Scott Wiener’s congressional campaign. No candidate in the Google, Facebook, or Airbnb post-IPO comparison received same-day donations from more than five employees, according to the Standard’s analysis.
This spring, 13 Anthropic and OpenAI employees gave Xavier Becerra the maximum allowable $39,000 each during the final two weeks of California’s gubernatorial primary, totaling over half a million dollars.
Nearly 39% of Anthropic’s donors have given the legal maximum to at least one campaign, more than double the equivalent rate for Airbnb. Adjusted for inflation, Anthropic employees are outgiving their prior tech counterparts more than threefold.
The Brockman Factor
OpenAI President Greg Brockman’s two $12.5 million donations to Leading the Future (an anti-regulatory super PAC) and MAGA Inc. dominate the raw totals, as Wired reported. But even excluding Brockman’s $25 million, OpenAI employees have surpassed giving from Google and Airbnb employees in equivalent post-IPO cycles.
Brockman’s support for anti-regulatory PACs has generated visible internal pushback. OpenAI employees donated more than $215,000 to a rival super PAC focused on AI safety, according to Wired.
Regulation Is the Through Line
The concentration of donations in AI safety candidates and regulation-focused PACs signals that AI lab employees are actively trying to shape the rules that will govern their own industry. Adam Conner, Facebook’s first Washington, D.C. hire, told the Standard that early tech workers showed little political interest: “Tech was not a controversial issue, or a key political issue at the time, the way AI is now.”
For teams building autonomous agents and AI infrastructure, the political spending pattern offers a leading indicator: the people closest to frontier AI development are betting that regulation is coming and are investing to influence its shape before their companies go public.