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AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying
https://archive.ph/PASMJ https://archive.ph/PASMJ
- ChrisArchitect 3mo ago[flagged]
- peter_stokes 3mo agofor the first time ever, i got a reCaptcha that required me to scan a QR code? Thankfully when I refreshed the page, I got a new busclicking captcha
- dieselgate 3mo agoI've been seeing them too. Towards the bottom of the recaptcha box there's an option to select "conventional" or similar and not use QR, it's easy to miss
- peter_stokes 3mo agooh, thanks for pointing this out ill click that next time. i can be a bit unaware sometimes. one time i visited a compromised site that put up a fake cloudflare challenge that told me to paste a script into powershell, and i was all ladeeda nothing seems wrong. only because i forgot how to paste in powershell, did i not run it. i sure tried though. I typed ctrl v about 5 times not realizing it wasnt supported in powershell and then ragequit. funnily enough, whne i refreshed that page to try and get rid of the challenge the page loaded fine. I fail upward like this all the time.
- nozzlegear 3mo ago> I got a new busclicking captcha Busclickers are S-tier captchas IMO, always easy to identify. Motorcycles and bicycles, on the other hand, are maybe the worst – D-tier at best. /tangent
- SoftTalker 3mo agoAnd they don't seem to be very particular. I just click a few boxes and usually get past it.
- nozzlegear 3mo agoI used to make a game of seeing how few matches, or how many deliberate mismatches, I could get away with while still passing the captcha. It asks for 4 bus images? How about 3 bus images, or 2 bus images and a car?
- butlike 3mo agoI never used to mind captchas until llms came around. Now, train your own damn robot
- simonw 3mo ago> 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.
- butlike 3mo agoWell you don't want to push the price up any more than you have to since then each subsequent lobby will cost a minimum of that amount.
- 01284a7e 3mo agoIt's so cheap that normal people could band together and re-buy democracy. It's the banding together part that is hard.
- triceratops 3mo agoNormal people can't offer speaking fees, consulting gigs, and other sinecures to politicians and their staffers after they leave the government.
- thewebguyd 3mo agoRight. That's what actually buys you the politician. Being able to promise "Pass this regulation for us and we'll make sure you are set up for life, since we know it's politically unfavorable" the ~$2M just gets your foot in the door, that's it.
- triceratops 3mo agoAnd also they can threaten to fund an opponent's PAC.
- reactordev 3mo agoOr primary you
- Kapura 3mo agois that good
- whatever1 3mo agoEveryone should be lobbying. It is the golden era of lobbying with 100% success rates. Whether you are in AI or the lettuce industry.
- SirHackalot 3mo agoIt was always the era of lobbying, now you just shower the gold-obsessed king with tribute — crypto, ballroom funds, a private jet — in order to buy a presidential decree. Just lay gold and silver at the feet of the monarch and wait for your royal pardon or policy favor.
- scottyah 3mo agoIt was so funny when Apple gave Trump an actual gold bar
- vitorfblima 3mo agoI know many people who are using AI, but only a few are actually eating their lettuces, so I guess there's some conflict there
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- tudou527 3mo ago[flagged]
- mrloopex 3mo agoAnd this is after crypto bros spent record sums on lobbying 5 years ago.
- shevy-java 3mo agoThat'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 ...
- Arodex 3mo agoMy latest Epstein WTF moment: moot (yeah, the guy from 4chan). Epstein even drive him back home... /pol/ was created a few days later. Qanon went on to start there, before moving to 8chan, a competitor bought by Jim Watkins (and certainly Bannon behind him).
- zombittack 3mo agoYou 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.
- FLeXMurphy 3mo agoYes, call your reps. See if anything changes since the last time you called them.
- hermannj314 3mo agoIt is hard to find actual data that supports the claim that calling your congressperson matters, mostly the internet is full of anecdata and wishful thinking. Effective altruism has some data that suggests it works marginally for state leglislators but works quite well for undecided federal officials. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oStggnYLGzomhvvn/talking-to-congress-can-constituents-contacting-their https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oStggnYLGzomhvvn/...
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoYou don’t have credibility. someone in Washington who goes to lunches with senators does.
- goldlimetea 3mo ago[flagged]
- atlasunshrugged 3mo agoFor 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://techcongress.io/ https://horizonpublicservice.org/ https://horizonpublicservice.org/
- dboreham 3mo agoI've always wondered: is this actually wanted? I ask because I live in a low population state where it's fairly easy to make contact with politicians' offices and there have been various cases over the years where I've noticed things occurring that seem off from a technical perspective, and have offered to help. Nobody ever seemed interested, which led me to believe their incentives lie somewhere other than "getting things right" or "learning the truth". (both parties, fwiw).
- thaumaturgy 3mo agoI did this in Oregon earlier this year for legislation that sat at the intersection of tech and surveillance. I am currently a registered lobbyist as a consequence of those efforts (for which I have been paid $0). In my experience, yes, it is actually wanted. But, it's not enough to just offer to help. Legislative processes are very very human -- i.e., you have to spend time in person, meeting people, getting to know people, remembering their names and faces and trivia about them, building relationships. When you're not doing that, you have to be making informational materials. And when you're not doing that, you have to be building influence in whatever community or subject area you're trying to represent the interests of. It would be really wonderful to see more people with the means to do so getting involved in this way. One of the reasons everything seems to be getting worse in so many areas is that most of the people doing this work aren't doing it on behalf of the interests of the average person.
- 3mo ago
- SwellJoe 3mo agoAnthropic 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.
- dboreham 3mo agoThis 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.
- raspberryhead 3mo agoLobbying should be illegal at this scale.
- TheTaytay 3mo agoLots of pitchforks in these comments. If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers? Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad. The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.
- jbm 3mo agoLobbying, as it is practised in the US, is hardly better than bribery. Talking to lawmakers about what is exclusively in your best interest, to the exclusion of everything else, is harmful. You wind up leveraging a group collective's understanding of dishonesty and dark speech patterns. No citizen has the eloquence or bull pulpit to oppose this. That said, this is how the US works now. It might have started with military-industrial companies, but it is basically wide spread. Unfortunately, once the taboo is broken, it is broken permanently.
- falcor84 3mo agoYou're making this very dichotomous, but I'm not convinced. Why shouldn't there be a way to bring issues to the parliament's attention without private money? For example, while flawed, the EU's Citizens' Initiative approach seems to be doing some good work bringing attention to issues that are in the public interest. I'd encourage us to look more extensively into these sort of open initiatives.
- TheTaytay 3mo agoFair point, and I concede I oversimplified. I certainly don’t think that this should be the only way to talk to a lawmaker! I should be able to schedule time to go meet with my representatives or his/her people. I should also be able to pay someone to do so on my behalf. I’m not familiar with the Citizen’s Initiative approach! I’ll look into it, and agree we should have more organized and official ways of doing it. I have called my congressman and senator’s office a couple of times in the US, and it doesn’t feel very productive. I wish it was easier to organize a group to make our concerns known. Speaking of the EU, I have been surprised to watch the ChatControl stuff keep resurfacing and be struck down over and over and over again. It feels very much like the “government” wants something that the citizens and their private companies do not. Perhaps it is a result of lobbying for it by private interests, but it seems like an effort by the current powers that be to overstep what people would otherwise want to “lobby against”.
- wkandek 3mo agoDoes not seem like a lot. US Chamber of Commerce spends 600M/year, Meta 160M, Bayer 73M, Toyota 64M. https://www.openlobby.us/clients https://www.openlobby.us/clients
- mark_l_watson 3mo agoWelcome to our political system. There are ways to fix this, in theory, but our government has passed the point of no return with corruption. There is one solution: no one register as a democrat or republican: this would make the dirty D.C. system a little harder to corrupt the system. Unfortunately, people let their emotions guide them in thinking about political parties. Most people are idiots who can’t see how they are divided into two groups and manipulated. Too bad, this used to be a nice little country we had.
- manvshin 3mo agoCurious whether anyone's tracked how this compares to lobbying spend from earlier tech waves at a similar stage — e.g. crypto/fintech circa 2018-2019, or telecom in the 90s. Is $2-3M actually low for an industry this size, or is AI lobbying still ramping toward where crypto ended up?