Super PACs backed by OpenAI and Anthropic have funneled $100 million into the 2026 midterms, with nearly $60 million already spent across at least 65 House and Senate races, according to a Christian Science Monitor analysis of FEC filings. The dividing line in nearly every one of those races is the same question: whether Congress preempts state AI laws, or lets the patchwork keep growing.

The money is uneven in shape but aligned in objective. Leading the Future, a super PAC active in at least 48 races per Reuters, has absorbed a $25 million donation from OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, plus a combined $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz and its founders. Anthropic has routed at least $40 million through Public First Action. An affiliated group, Build American AI, is running ads calling for a single national AI standard. In one New York congressional primary, the two sides spent a combined $27 million and neither got their preferred candidate.

That’s roughly the political stakes map. The compliance stakes map is tidier. If federal preemption wins, small businesses deploying AI for outreach, pricing, or customer communication plan against one rulebook, the one sketched in Anthropic’s draft federal AI bill and its preemption clause. If it loses, they plan against California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York simultaneously, including New York’s 72-hour security-incident reporting rule.

Even the industry doesn’t agree on which side it’s on. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called federal preemption “too blunt,” while the PAC his company funds targets state-rights incumbents. Senate candidate Andy Barr (R-Ky.), now backed by Leading the Future, told the Lexington Herald-Leader in March he supports federal legislation blocking states from enforcing their own AI rules.

Congress left for the midterms with federal AI law dead until 2027, and the White House task force’s “no new law” charter hardens the interim. November 3 decides which rulebook the next Congress inherits, not whether one exists.

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