The Flood
AI safety money could save American AI politics. As it stands, it won’t.
Every year, the Nile floods. For thousands of years, the fate of Egypt depended on its ability to absorb these floods: to guide them through irrigation channels and dams, leading them to water the fields along the river. Underprepare, and your crops will wither; reach too greedily, and they will drown.
In just a few months, many people who care deeply about AI safety will become very, very rich. Employees at frontier AI developers are a highly idiosyncratic crowd deeply convinced of the singular importance of AI, and they’re about to receive windfalls as their companies go public. Most of them don’t think the American government has been doing a very good job so far. Many might spend their money to try changing things for the better.
It’s fortuitous timing: right now, American AI policy is a mess. Principals are brought in by happenstance, executive orders are announced, delayed, inverted and then ignored, Congress is nowhere to be seen. Serious policy operators are forced to ponder how many Friday mornings CEOs of trillion-dollar companies usually spend at wellness retreats. The result so far is an AI policy paradigm that can only be described as erratic—a licensing regime by executive fiat, draconian at times, yet laissez-faire once politicians stop caring or labs decide to simply deploy their best models internally instead.
Our way out runs through a more serious executive and a more ambitious legislature—both of which can be helped along by well-deployed political spending. Money well spent can help 2028’s presidential hopefuls find language and policy to talk about safety1, and it can encourage a deeply divided Congress to actually act when it needs to. Political money buys us insurance against a destructive ‘28 primary that pulls both sides toward vulgar populism, and assets to steer the coming legislative fights away from partisan conflict.
But however big the potential upside, this influx also makes for a volatile moment in AI politics. Too much money can change a field for the worse. If it flows too narrowly and visibly, it galvanises opponents, raises suspicion, and invites pushback. It could even burn the entire issue area—as we’ve seen even in recent months, when high-profile industry spending has led candidates away from commenting on AI altogether. To raise the level of public debate, money must flood into a wide and healthy field. It must be able to reach candidates across the spectrum and draw them into the debates worth having.
Yet the current AI safety policy ecosystem in Washington consists of only a handful of advocacy organisations, largely monopolised by a narrow strand of tactical thinking. Only a few players are positioned to use the money coming their way: those with advocacy organisations, reputable super-PACs, and ground game in the halls of Congress. And they have every incentive to guard their turf.
Within a year, newly-minted lab millionaires will look to spend their money and use their power to change policy for the better, and they’ll discover a funding ecosystem lacking in diverse options. What would be left to do? They could invest into the few existing organisations to the limit and beyond, overextending into their political bet and inviting forceful backlash. Or they could hold off altogether. Neither makes the best of their money. But it’s not too late to prepare a portfolio approach instead—to dig and build.
The Drowning and the Thirsty
Last month, U.S. House Representatives Lori Trahan and Jay Obernolte presented the Great American AI Act. Its nearly 300 pages of discussion draft cover a lot of ground—in short, it proposes to pass a federal version of the most ambitious state laws on frontier AI, make them more enforceable, and strengthen and fund the embattled Center for AI Standards and Innovation. In exchange, it grants industry its long-standing ask for federal preemption of many state-level laws on AI development. What might a safety coalition make of such a draft? It’s complicated: preemption is politically fraught, state laws are strong, and you might think there are better deals on the horizon; but the safety gains would unmistakably be real.
Political reality did not reflect this tension. Instead, prominent AI safety policy groups rejected the draft forcefully, arguing that the inclusion of preemption was a nonstarter and demonstrated industry capture of the worst kind. Americans for Responsible Innovation, the premier safety advocacy group connected to PAC network Public First, went so far as to launch an ad campaign against Trahan. The campaign is silent on the safety merits, loud on state preemption and its alleged links to civil rights violations, murders, and school shootings. One ad ends with an appeal to oppose preemption, on striking images of a candlelight vigil for dead children.
As far as I can tell, the incumbent coalition has made two conscious tactical decisions. First, it believes time is on its side: through a mix of state-level advocacy and rising salience of AI policy, the ‘deal’ on the table will continue to get better, so premature deals must be swiftly defeated in service of a better future law. Second, it has committed to alliances to defeat last summer’s idea of an AI state law moratorium. That alliance is almost impossibly broad, at once including people who would’ve sat floorside at the DNC and on the editorial board of Breitbart News in 2016. Such a group is highly adept at mobilising against the laissez-faire politics of the early Trump admin, and is therefore the perfect vehicle for the delaying strategy. But it can’t be reoriented easily, and it has less substantive consensus. Most of its members—child safety groups, labor unions or fire-and-brimstone populists—would never go for a deal that traded away preemption for narrow AI safety.
Neither choice is unreasonable in its own right, but this strategy comes with a high cost. Most immediately, that cost falls on legislative proposals like the Trahan-Obernolte bill. Who knows how many co-sponsors were scared away, how many sympathetic policymakers decided to trust the safety advocates and rejected the bill out of hand? You might dream that some heterodox counterfunding could have given the idea just enough oxygen for a real shot.
But in all likelihood, that bill was never going to pass anyway. The real discussion is about the political path dependencies that follow from the way in which it fails. Consider what message this sends to a policymaker genuinely in search of new coalitions and approaches to making frontier AI safe. Suppose they care about safety deeply, but they disagree with the orthodoxy on economic effects, on the importance of general tech regulation, privacy, copyright, name it. They still want to figure out how to make the frontier safe, but they’re willing to enter tough trade-offs. I’d like to hear from such a politician.
But after these recent episodes, will they feel emboldened to bring these thoughts into the marketplace of ideas in search of feedback and new majorities—or will politicians feel like staking out any new ground will catch them a stern talking to and an ad to go with it?
The specific organisations that have made these decisions are not to blame. In politics, you have to place bets; any one organisation, any one super-PAC cannot cover the entire portfolio at once. The most visible parts of the AI safety coalition have made their bet. Now we get to evaluate them on the merits. That’s how it should work.
As it stands, the safety movement is overcommitted to this one bet because it lacks genuine breadth. When Anthropic decided to spend for a champion and funding vessel, there were only a few established c4s with credible political operatives in leadership. When lab employees look for guidance, few are available to provide it. That effect is self-reinforcing: the biggest networks become more influential, build connections and track records, which again help with fundraising. But the commitments that bind them remain—and with them the risk that safety’s champions are drawn to act like three labor unions in a trenchcoat.
Irrigation Channels
Why harp on the incumbents? I admit to some bias—I liked the draft, and I would’ve liked to see it get more serious political attention from the safety side. But hard-nosed politicking is the incumbents’ prerogative. They’re only being prudent in pre-positioning and preparing, and digging the irrigation channels for their own fields. Stylistic disagreements and the odd policy fight aside, they do much good work, and their theory of the case will convince many donors. But still: fields like these are not ready for the flood.
Facing Washington, today’s messages and positions are not compatible with all political persuasions, not suitable to reach all presidential candidates or even both parties equally well. Facing San Francisco, today’s methods and priorities don’t reflect the plurality of donor views on what should be done—losing potential donors who welcome safety on principle, but have qualms about the current safety coalition. No matter how sold you are on the current tactics, you should welcome diversification as a means to broaden the tent and hedge your political bets.
An AI Safety PAC in Every Backyard
The best policy infrastructure would have DC organisations represent donor and expert beliefs with far greater fidelity. That’s a greater challenge than in past waves of political spending, where engaged donors only needed to pick candidates and positions they liked. Today, for many positions held in San Francisco, there might be no operatives and no candidates in play. Count on existing channels, and you get a leaky pipeline from spending to positions to outcomes: because you have to make do with what you can fund, you spend on the next-best idea or candidate, who then has to scramble to pass their own next-best idea. Be early and diversified, and you reach a much higher fidelity.
I can tell you: the range of donor views is astounding. Some of them believe locking down the labs and largely restricting the frontier to internal deployment is right, some of them believe the only way to make this safe is iterative deployment in the public eye. Some think that the labs must be named responsible stewards, some think nationalisation is in order. Some predict massive labor disruption is imminent and worth addressing as the central priority to retain political stability, some hold that getting into the weeds of social and economic policy is a dire mistake and distraction from technical safety issues. Some of them are Republicans, some of them are Democrats.
These different views map onto different political camps. Think ahead to the presidential primaries. A candidate on the heterodox right might be interested to hear out a major donor who cares about AI safety, but not if that donor had their roots in the Democratic establishment. An unabashedly pro-tech moderate might want to consider a narrow frontier safety carveout, but not caught anywhere near the usual pro-regulation groups. A populist left-wing politician might be very interested to further push the risk case, but would be profoundly uninterested in entertaining groups with ties to corporate labs. Or just look toward the ‘27 Congress instead. If any AI bill is to pass a split government and make it all the way to 60 votes in the Senate, a fundamental case for AI safety must be available in all languages. Everyone needs to be able to explain why this is good to their own constituencies.
The more separate organisations and funding channels there are, the easier it is to make sure the disagreement over the AI bill unfolds everywhere else, while the safety part remains intact. That still leaves risk of friendly fire—but we could use some of that. Pluralisation begets intra-coalitional conflict, there’s no way around that. But I still feel the safety agenda and message could do with more competitive selection pressures: right now, there’s no stable ask, no proven-best way to communicate it, and no surefire political champion to rally around. A bit of constructive conflict between organisations around the best message and the best pitch sounds pretty good to me. So long as there is no clear best safety policy agenda on the merits, what looks like ‘consolidation’ is in fact a risky all-in on a policy agenda that might fail in the world even if it succeeds in Congress. I’d take safety-versus-safety fights in Congress over a strong consensus on weakly-held beliefs.
I don’t know a lot about who will shape the AI conversation in the primary, or which part of the executive gets tossed the hot potato in half a year, or which committee chair gets to keep the big AI bill of ‘27 out of the NDAA. I don’t think anyone else truly does. But by then, I’d like to have safety organisations in the field that can talk to each of them in their own language.
I Spent $19 Million On NY-12 And All I Got Was Micah Lasher
Even more than the substance, the market dynamics need fixing. Right now, the most obvious failure mode of political spending on AI is that spending invites backlash and counterspending. We’re seeing early versions of this even now. Public First and Leading the Future spent absurd sums of money on the Democratic primary in New York’s 12th district, one to elect safety champion Alex Bores, the other to derail him. In the end, the escalating fight has raised Bores’ profile and invited national discussion on big tech electioneering, but to little avail. Micah Lasher, the presumptive nominee from the start, still won. No one has a very compelling story to tell about what happened.
But the underlying dynamic—AI money’s totalising tendency to turn every race it touches into being about AI—is scaring away policymakers. It’s motivating congressional leadership to encourage members not to take a stand on AI at all, and it’s motivating candidates to reject engaging with AI policy at all. Likewise, many early donors who tried to engage with this midterm cycle have not looked kindly on the early result. They feel their money is drawn into an escalating conflict that makes campaign operatives rich and ads expensive, as well as tarnishing the reputation of AI policy spending. Operatives will tell you this was unavoidable—or at least preferable to handing Leading the Future a Fairshake-style reputation of being able to kill campaigns disliked by its donors. But that was this cycle—they can and should do better next time around.
What you should want is to be able to spend on candidates without causing a head-to-head conflict. But the fewer safety vehicles there are, the greater the risk of counterspending and backlash. If ‘AI safety’ is something that can be coherently characterised because it lives in only a few organisations, it also becomes something that can be coherently opposed. If there’s a tightly-knit cluster of effective-altruist-styled funding vehicles, all not only committed to some abstract sense of safety but more contentious political attitudes, opponents have an easy time pointing at that cluster. That makes it easy to raise money or run ads against. That’s a big deal, because as the first rounds of sparring between LTF and Public First show us, you don’t need to match a spending effort pound for pound to derail it—if an attempt to take influence attracts enough focused attention, it’s easy to counteract with a fraction of the funds. That makes focused spending susceptible to homeostasis: put in more effort, and the natural correcting forces will oppose you all the more.
The most acute version is the two-horse-race dynamic in high-profile races. Right now, there is acute competition over which spending story is true. Can the accelerationists freeze out political interest in regulating AI, or can the safetyists keep up enough? One group’s gain is the other group’s loss, so they tend to spend in the same districts. If one endorses a candidate, the other is incentivised to stop them: to deny them an advocate in Congress as well as a PR win for their story.
If the influx of spending can flow through operatives and messages that are genuinely not safety orthodoxy, much of the homeostatic reaction can be avoided. At some point, guerrilla counterstrategies built on scandalisation stop working as well. You can already start to see it now: are accelerationists going to succeed in painting the most hawkish AI security decisionmakers as safetyists? Emil Michael doesn’t really read as an Effective Altruist, and I don’t think Sean Cairncross has ever been to Lighthaven. No: AI safety, in some shape or form, will become a mainstream concern. That is the necessary consequence of building systems smarter than humans. And if that’s the factual trend, consolidation is a tactical error. Safetyists must not do their opponents the favour of politically restricting their own coalition. They would make their own concerns seem more parochial, weird and politically fraught than they are.
All-In
The counterargument, of course, is the power of consolidation. One PAC, one strategy, one coherent spending effort that actually identifies the correct lever of power and goes all in on it. This is all well and good, proponents of that story would tell you, but we live in the real world. Democrats will drive technology regulation, no Democrat can build a majority or get elected against labor and child safety and industry and public opinion. So you can either get on board with the strategy, or you might be better-advised to spend your money on bednets instead. To my mind, that argument is worth taking seriously.
But it overrates the marginal returns on political spending. I think that in the AI policy environment we’re headed for, deploying political money into highly adversarial contests is never going to be all that helpful. The safety coalition knows this, because it has made the same case to argue Leading the Future would not be successful: as AI becomes salient enough, the political merits of a position ultimately outweigh the money.
Instead, I think there are two breakpoints: get them to care, and get them elected. As the latter gets harder and harder, we should satisfy the former everywhere first.
The first breakpoint is reached once a politically fitting message and mechanism is developed and popularised. Third-party oversight or national security involvement? Framed as hawkishness or anti-tech sentiment? Once this message resonates and politicians have enough incentive to stick to it even in the face of industry spending, more money piled onto the same play does not do all that much more. Once any given vehicle is sufficiently well-capitalised, we should expect it to secure this kind of foothold with its political champions—they’ve convinced a presidential candidate and a handful of lawmakers. Any further cash they invest perhaps strengthens the marginal political power of that point even further, but further spending mostly runs into big-ticket politics. The ballgame becomes winning an election, which seems to be so hard that even 19 million dollars for a charismatic safety champion in a low-salience New York primary can’t get it done.
Read through all this, and it might strike you as objectionable—undemocratic, technocratic, elitist. Why, you might ask, is fidelity to donor tastes so important? Why is making this money succeed so critical? It isn’t, at least not as an end in itself. But you can’t stop this flood either way. Precisely because it’s coming anyway, because there will be backlash against it anyway, we can’t let it run through only a few channels. If only a few political camps and politicians get it, others will be able to stigmatise and rally against accepting tech money. But if safety spending is everywhere, no one is incentivised to lead the backlash. The optics and substance of all this money infiltrating American politics are never great, but much better if it moves AI policy everywhere instead of fuelling big-ticket politics at a few flashpoints.
I know. I don’t like the moral aesthetics here, either. But the tactical reality is clear. Money in politics does exist, the AI policy field in particular will have lots of it even if every last safetyist abstains. So yes—in another life, I would have loved just doing campaign finance reform with all of you instead. But we don’t live that life. Takeoff is happening now, we must govern it well, and Citizens United stands.
Shovels Out
So we must dig, and fast. What must we dig? I suppose that’s where I’ll finally let go of the metaphor—we need to build a roster of uncorrelated bets, each able to absorb some funding, each engaged in some friendly competition for the AI safety money. Good work is underway along such lines already—those in the weeds might even read some suggestions as descriptive of good efforts in the field. Take this piece as an endorsement, not a rebuttal: more of this work must be done, and it must be prioritised. These efforts need steady and cautious attention, else they won’t survive the six hours of coast-to-coast flights.
Whether an organisation can absorb money well comes down to its reputation and its ability to get things done. DC is a suspicious place, and any new entrant that tries to spend too brazenly without a reputation and a track record will draw a skeptical response. Three things are useful: having been there for a while, including having done some spending already; convincing and recruiting trustworthy senior operatives with very deep DC reputation; and having spent some time testing, iterating, polling messages. All of that takes time. That means simple donor aggregation funds and advisory schemes aren’t enough, not even if they try to turn around candidates at the eleventh hour. Their policy vehicles and coalitions will be brittle and hastily assembled, not fit for a high-salience fight. If you want operations to be ready for ‘27 and the primaries, they need to start very soon. We can’t wait until the post-IPO donors have set up their IBKR accounts, eaten all the omakase in town and ‘done Europe’ twice.
As to specific organisations that I’d like to see: don’t listen to me too much. I’m not making any funding recommendations, nor am I endorsing public policy—I’ll stick to the widely attended gatherings. If you read this analysis and really think you should spend this money on groups calling for AI pauses, I think you should do that. If you think the correct AI safety case sits at the intersection of hardcore national security for the frontier and free-market laissez-faire for the rest, there should be space for that. And if you’d prefer to come up with a more technocratic vehicle—a ‘friends of the future’ PAC—I’d be even more excited. The point is to enable that competition of ideas to begin with.
For would-be donors, very concretely, you shouldn’t rely on the funding channels being in place after your windfall. Instead, you should make your funding interests known early—make an advance market commitment for PACs and candidates, get the word out that you’d like to spend money in support of your AI policy takes. Get together with a few allies that agree on policy aims, write down the five things you care about, and circulate them among your most politics-savvy friends. It’s a cheap appeal to the San Franciscan temperament, but no less true: there really is no room full of experts who have figured all this out and just need a cheque. You can and should pull the political activity you’d like to support into the present.
The broader field can help with that. There’s a lot of value in preparing the channels early—to understand your most valuable contribution at this pre-flood time to be guiding, not adding to, the flow. Already well-capitalised institutional funders and philanthropies can pick up the slack today. They can scout founders and seed organisations to grow into the channels that the donors will need. They can start early work on polling and messaging. This is particularly important to guard against the grifters who will otherwise fill the space in search of easy money drawn from donors they perceive as gullible nerds.
The talent to do this work is a serious bottleneck. It’s still a tractable challenge. With some targeted effort, senior operatives and authoritative voices can be empowered to work on good AI policy. The true bottleneck is slightly different: most good operatives might be nudged on the substance, but cannot be controlled on the tactics. Perhaps for good reason, they do not defer to safety funders on their political calls. That is the cost of diversifying, and the path to recruit credible leaders: sacrifice internal alignment for broader influence. It’s a cost I would suggest is worth paying.
Much less concretely, the AI safety space needs to fix an attitude problem to make all this work. There needs to be more willingness to tolerate heterodox actors and uncorrelated bets. Today still, safety-aligned voices with no affiliation to safety orthodoxy are often viewed with skepticism, and cautioned against. In pursuit of this strategy, the opposite would be wise. Most new entrants to the AI safety ecosystem do much more to grow reach and funding than they take away from existing players. That also helps against the octopus charge that paints safety spending as a shadowy organisation involved everywhere. Genuine disagreement between established and idiosyncratic voices looks much less like an influence campaign.
Don’t do any of this, and find yourself pot committed to a strategy that is thrice vulnerable: to a failure of its states-first no-hostage strategy, to a rejection of its left-of-center coalition, and to backlash against its distinctly safetyist appearance. Ultimately, I’m just not sold enough on that tactic to recommend going all in on it. Instead, as we’re headed into a Congress and a primary full of political turmoil and deep uncertainty, I think safetyists should seek to hedge their bets. If this is going to work, we need an AI safety PAC in every backyard.
This phrase gives me a slight headache. Usually, I gesture toward ‘making advanced AI go well’ as the coherent unit of motivation instead. But in effect, much of the immediate positive role of policy action in service of that goal will be vaguely safety-flavoured. It might sometimes bleed into institutional design and labor policy—but as the risks are emerging more clearly, it feels evasive to call the core drive anything other than AI safety.