Eight current and former OpenAI employees have routed $248,000 into Guardrails Alliance, a pro-regulation super PAC positioned directly against Leading the Future, the industry vehicle to which OpenAI president Greg Brockman committed $50 million. The disclosure landed Wednesday in Guardrails’ FEC quarterly filing, which showed three of the eight donations; the PAC says five more will appear next cycle.

The largest came from research engineer Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, at OpenAI since 2022, who put in $200,000. Researcher Gabriel Wu is also on the list, and he isn’t being subtle about the motivation, citing “massive amounts of political money being spent to ensure AI remains unregulated.”

The scale asymmetry is the story. Guardrails launched in June with roughly $5 million and is targeting $15 million for the 2026 cycle. Leading the Future arrived last summer with more than $100 million pledged, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Perplexity, and investor Joe Lonsdale, and reported $75.8 million in receipts through June 30. Brockman’s $50 million commitment, split evenly with Anna Brockman at $12.5 million apiece so far, alone dwarfs everything Guardrails hopes to raise.

That money is already moving. Leading the Future spent about $8.2 million against New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, co-author of the RAISE Act; pro-safeguard groups countered with over $19 million. The proxy war has a template.

OpenAI’s official position is that it hasn’t funded any super PACs and doesn’t direct Leading the Future, though global affairs chief Chris Lehane has acknowledged advising on its creation, and former Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell sits in the orbit. Employees reading those disclosures have drawn their own conclusions and started writing checks against them. The 2010s tech-policy playbook assumed a unified industry front. That assumption is now visible in FEC filings as a fiction.

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