> 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.
It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails?
Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers. It’s helping them identify where the pre-existing political fault lines are and arming them with ammo for fights that will play out according to existing ideological positions. “K Street lobbyists” don’t even bill at the rates you see for corporate lawyers. $3 million per six months is what a company like Anthropic might burn in a single B2B lawsuit.
Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
This should be a basic fact. If those who spend a good portion of time being angry at lobbyists yet intelligent enough to make mid-six figures conflate bribery with lobbying, it should be no surprise the corporations have captured the government. The general public has essentially zero civic understanding while corporations are able to hire the few that do.
> Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
I don't think these are the only expenses, why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
The faintest whiff of a potential incentive wafted beneath the nose of an entrepreneur is enough to bring into motion the invisible hand. This is HN, that's what we do here. We assume that it is the same for politicians.
Lobbyists are in the business of wafting. It is quite enough for them to bring credible rumors of corporate agenda and plans to spend in pursuit of them. Political entrepreneurs will move to capture that spend without a single back-alley transaction involving burlap sacks of cash with comically large $ signs printed on the side. It has the same effect, though.
I already pay for my government in taxes (which ironically these big cos don't pay).
Besides, if I were to gather up 4 million to lobby, the opposition would simply spend 8 million instead which they could come up with just as easily. They don't have to outrun the bear, the just have to outrun you.
This is what a PAC is. Political Action Committee.
They primarily only get headlines for outrage topics when people don’t like what they’re pushing toward. Many of the top PACs are from groups like realtors or sheet metal workers lobbying for their interests.
Most people skip PACs and donate straight to political candidates instead. Individual donations to candidates outweigh anything the AI companies are spending by a huge number.
I think of that Netflix series on FIFA and its rampant corruption. The bribes in question are laughable, considering that FIFA is a multi-billion dollar operation, and it's always some round number like $1M. At least add some cents to it so it's not glaringly obvious in the bank accounts.
The estimated spending on the 2026 election season is $11.6 billion [1]. One primary has had an estimated $60 million spent on it (ie the Michigan Democratic primary). Thomas Massie's primary had an estimated $35 million spent on it. A GOP Super PAC has earmarked $342 million for 8 Senate races [2].
Over $5 billion was spent on lobbying in 2025 [3].
To truly move policy you need to get pliable representatives first and that's not just money. There is a pipeline here. First, you get the right connections. That could be coming from a wealth family, be the nephew or grandson of some politician, do your time as a staffer or whatever. Going up through the ranks acts as a giant filter to make sure you will maintain the status quo. So you have to find candidates to run for these offices who have been weeded out by the existing processes. And if you don't have enough of them, the DNC or RNC will spend selectively against you in the primary and general election. And an increasing number of races have over $100 million spent on them.
Buying back democracy would be very, very expensive.
And then after all that there's the income and jobs pipeline. Your children get six-figure jobs with think tanks and interested companies. You leave office and get placed on boards of large companies. You can't compete with that.
It seems to me that there's really nothing at that store that "normal people" want to buy.
Everything that we want to do can be done through ordinary collaboration with no need for the state. The special services which the state provides (violence and threats of violence, imperialism, inhibition of movement of people and goods across imaginary lines, etc) are the kinds of things that are really only interesting to the kinds of people who are already spending their money on lobbying.
It would not surprise me that the cost of lobbying rises exponentially as the policy moves left on the political spectrum. That pro-business, pro-austerity, neo-liberal policy is orders of magnitude cheaper to lobby for, then pro-worker, pro-democracy, pro-consumer policy.
Compared to the bailout they're going to get at some point, because they're vital to national security and whatever, I think you could easily be looking at a 1000x+ return on investment on those numbers.
These numbers are so small that I'm doubly ashamed of all the corruption happening. If politicians at least sold out for fuck-you money, I'd understand, but no.
That's what my microeconomics professor said shortly after Citizens United. "If political campaigns were that good of an investment, they'd be investing more!" ...and then they did. Outside spending absolutely took off after 2010 and shows no signs of slowing down. The conclusion he jumped to was false and it was false because he ignored the possibility that price discovery might take a while.
People need to look at financial kick backs. There is a certain
guy here in central Europe who left politics quite recently, but
suddenly has 400 million euros wealth - out of nowhere. And
nobody questions how he got that ...
The corruption happens not only via direct lobbyism. One has to
look at the whole corruption bribe bubble here.
Because lobbying is essentially just the process of petitioning the government. Mostly.
It's buying dinners so you can talk with a Representative or Senator one-on-one. It's traveling to D.C. or the Congressperson's home state. It's paying for studies and etc to support your points. It's financing campaigns of politicians who already agree with your viewpoints. It's not "here's money, make law".
It's also financing campaigns of politicians who don't agree with your viewpoints in the (fully justified) hope that they'll look upon you more favorably if they win. It's thinly veiled promises of cushy jobs after they leave office, if they play ball.
Alternatively, couldn't this be seen as evidence on favor of the "corporate narrative" on lobbying? Namely, that the purpose of lobbying is to ensure politicians have instant and easy access to high-quality, insider information relevant to their decision-making on corporate issues (as opposed to simply being bribed)?
I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).
I have a family member who's a lobbyist. When he talks about his job, a common theme is that a huge amount of his work is trying assess the impacts of policy on businesses (albeit mainly big businesses) and make sure lawmakers are able to take that into consideration. I don't know how well that represents lobbying as a whole, but that part always made sense and didn't seem like a bribe.
Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.
I never understood that narrative either. You won't get high quality information from someone that is paying you for influence. You will get a lopsided/biased perspective, and the unwritten expectation is you will use it or contributions will cease.
Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.
It always has been. Frankly, sometimes they don't even spend anything at all at lower levels, it's just a conversation, a meeting with an animatronic bureaucrat high on their own self-importance and power, in a mandatory spending jukebox of incompetence and failure. I have seen people squander millions simply because they were too incompetent to properly run an organization, plan, and budget and they needed to spend the money merely so it is not taken from them next budget cycle. I am also witness to corruption and nepotism that wildly enriches people merely because doing so is easy and does not require actual work.
The return on "lobbying" for corporations is immense, actually, it's a bit of a high cost, high return with some risks type of dynamic; but especially in the Beltway bandit den and increasingly in the silicon cartel valley they have worked out a systematic methodology for bamboozling and manipulating utterly inadequately prepared bureaucrats squandering other people's money with approaching zero consequences. No, even they not only don't face consequences, they are promoted faster the better and faster they can squander money and enrich friends and associates.
For 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.
I'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).
You 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.
It 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.
Anthropic 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.
This 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.
I'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
That'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 ...
My 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).
It 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.
> 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.
It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails?
Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers. It’s helping them identify where the pre-existing political fault lines are and arming them with ammo for fights that will play out according to existing ideological positions. “K Street lobbyists” don’t even bill at the rates you see for corporate lawyers. $3 million per six months is what a company like Anthropic might burn in a single B2B lawsuit.
Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
This should be a basic fact. If those who spend a good portion of time being angry at lobbyists yet intelligent enough to make mid-six figures conflate bribery with lobbying, it should be no surprise the corporations have captured the government. The general public has essentially zero civic understanding while corporations are able to hire the few that do.
> Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
I don't think these are the only expenses, why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
2 replies →
The faintest whiff of a potential incentive wafted beneath the nose of an entrepreneur is enough to bring into motion the invisible hand. This is HN, that's what we do here. We assume that it is the same for politicians.
Lobbyists are in the business of wafting. It is quite enough for them to bring credible rumors of corporate agenda and plans to spend in pursuit of them. Political entrepreneurs will move to capture that spend without a single back-alley transaction involving burlap sacks of cash with comically large $ signs printed on the side. It has the same effect, though.
> not politicians
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaa
Can you explain what you mean by
>some humanities or social science majors
this? Im sensing some meaning towards you calling out their degrees.
Your comment implies you have some deep civic understanding so can you expland on what your POV is? Im not american and would like to konw.
It's so cheap that normal people could band together and re-buy democracy. It's the banding together part that is hard.
Many of the groups that spend the most on lobbying are composed of "normal" people who have banded together for some common interest. For example:
- The AARP ($21M annual spend) has 38M members
- The National Association of Realtors ($54M annual spend) has 1.5M members
- The American Medical Association ($24M annual spend) has 300K members
Of course that doesn't mean that their interests necessarily align with your interests.
4 replies →
I already pay for my government in taxes (which ironically these big cos don't pay).
Besides, if I were to gather up 4 million to lobby, the opposition would simply spend 8 million instead which they could come up with just as easily. They don't have to outrun the bear, the just have to outrun you.
2 replies →
Normal people can't offer speaking fees, consulting gigs, and other sinecures to politicians and their staffers after they leave the government.
6 replies →
This is what a PAC is. Political Action Committee.
They primarily only get headlines for outrage topics when people don’t like what they’re pushing toward. Many of the top PACs are from groups like realtors or sheet metal workers lobbying for their interests.
Most people skip PACs and donate straight to political candidates instead. Individual donations to candidates outweigh anything the AI companies are spending by a huge number.
1 reply →
And you cannot offer the Kushner family OpenAI shares. The 4 million is just the surface.
I think of that Netflix series on FIFA and its rampant corruption. The bribes in question are laughable, considering that FIFA is a multi-billion dollar operation, and it's always some round number like $1M. At least add some cents to it so it's not glaringly obvious in the bank accounts.
3 replies →
The estimated spending on the 2026 election season is $11.6 billion [1]. One primary has had an estimated $60 million spent on it (ie the Michigan Democratic primary). Thomas Massie's primary had an estimated $35 million spent on it. A GOP Super PAC has earmarked $342 million for 8 Senate races [2].
Over $5 billion was spent on lobbying in 2025 [3].
To truly move policy you need to get pliable representatives first and that's not just money. There is a pipeline here. First, you get the right connections. That could be coming from a wealth family, be the nephew or grandson of some politician, do your time as a staffer or whatever. Going up through the ranks acts as a giant filter to make sure you will maintain the status quo. So you have to find candidates to run for these offices who have been weeded out by the existing processes. And if you don't have enough of them, the DNC or RNC will spend selectively against you in the primary and general election. And an increasing number of races have over $100 million spent on them.
Buying back democracy would be very, very expensive.
And then after all that there's the income and jobs pipeline. Your children get six-figure jobs with think tanks and interested companies. You leave office and get placed on boards of large companies. You can't compete with that.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/media-advertising/articles/2026-el...
[2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5818507-gop-super-pac-...
[3]: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying
That's how Groupon originally started.
It seems to me that there's really nothing at that store that "normal people" want to buy.
Everything that we want to do can be done through ordinary collaboration with no need for the state. The special services which the state provides (violence and threats of violence, imperialism, inhibition of movement of people and goods across imaginary lines, etc) are the kinds of things that are really only interesting to the kinds of people who are already spending their money on lobbying.
It would not surprise me that the cost of lobbying rises exponentially as the policy moves left on the political spectrum. That pro-business, pro-austerity, neo-liberal policy is orders of magnitude cheaper to lobby for, then pro-worker, pro-democracy, pro-consumer policy.
1 reply →
"re-buy democracy"
1 reply →
Compared to the bailout they're going to get at some point, because they're vital to national security and whatever, I think you could easily be looking at a 1000x+ return on investment on those numbers.
The real lobbying here is the fact that key politicians own combined billions in AI and related company stock.
These numbers are so small that I'm doubly ashamed of all the corruption happening. If politicians at least sold out for fuck-you money, I'd understand, but no.
It's pocket change now, but they are lobbying hard now knowing well they won't be able to afford it later.
Wow - so one really good researchers salary/stock grant. I feel like they're underinvesting...
That's what my microeconomics professor said shortly after Citizens United. "If political campaigns were that good of an investment, they'd be investing more!" ...and then they did. Outside spending absolutely took off after 2010 and shows no signs of slowing down. The conclusion he jumped to was false and it was false because he ignored the possibility that price discovery might take a while.
Well 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.
That's most definitely not the real sum.
People need to look at financial kick backs. There is a certain guy here in central Europe who left politics quite recently, but suddenly has 400 million euros wealth - out of nowhere. And nobody questions how he got that ...
The corruption happens not only via direct lobbyism. One has to look at the whole corruption bribe bubble here.
Because lobbying is essentially just the process of petitioning the government. Mostly.
It's buying dinners so you can talk with a Representative or Senator one-on-one. It's traveling to D.C. or the Congressperson's home state. It's paying for studies and etc to support your points. It's financing campaigns of politicians who already agree with your viewpoints. It's not "here's money, make law".
It's also financing campaigns of politicians who don't agree with your viewpoints in the (fully justified) hope that they'll look upon you more favorably if they win. It's thinly veiled promises of cushy jobs after they leave office, if they play ball.
Alternatively, couldn't this be seen as evidence on favor of the "corporate narrative" on lobbying? Namely, that the purpose of lobbying is to ensure politicians have instant and easy access to high-quality, insider information relevant to their decision-making on corporate issues (as opposed to simply being bribed)?
I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).
I have a family member who's a lobbyist. When he talks about his job, a common theme is that a huge amount of his work is trying assess the impacts of policy on businesses (albeit mainly big businesses) and make sure lawmakers are able to take that into consideration. I don't know how well that represents lobbying as a whole, but that part always made sense and didn't seem like a bribe.
Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.
Reminds me of the time Tony Blair left office and went to work for JP Morgan Chase.
https://www.forbes.com/2008/01/10/jpmorgan-consultancy-advis...
I never understood that narrative either. You won't get high quality information from someone that is paying you for influence. You will get a lopsided/biased perspective, and the unwritten expectation is you will use it or contributions will cease.
Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.
1 reply →
It always has been. Frankly, sometimes they don't even spend anything at all at lower levels, it's just a conversation, a meeting with an animatronic bureaucrat high on their own self-importance and power, in a mandatory spending jukebox of incompetence and failure. I have seen people squander millions simply because they were too incompetent to properly run an organization, plan, and budget and they needed to spend the money merely so it is not taken from them next budget cycle. I am also witness to corruption and nepotism that wildly enriches people merely because doing so is easy and does not require actual work.
The return on "lobbying" for corporations is immense, actually, it's a bit of a high cost, high return with some risks type of dynamic; but especially in the Beltway bandit den and increasingly in the silicon cartel valley they have worked out a systematic methodology for bamboozling and manipulating utterly inadequately prepared bureaucrats squandering other people's money with approaching zero consequences. No, even they not only don't face consequences, they are promoted faster the better and faster they can squander money and enrich friends and associates.
Forget the lobby, the parlor is where it's at.
For 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://horizonpublicservice.org/
I'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).
You 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.
You don’t have credibility. someone in Washington who goes to lunches with senators does.
Yes, call your reps. See if anything changes since the last time you called them.
It 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/...
Anthropic 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.
This 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.
Is anyone reading your endless ft.com posts?
https://archive.ph/PASMJ
I never used to mind captchas until llms came around. Now, train your own damn robot
for 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
> 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
2 replies →
I'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
1 reply →
And this is after crypto bros spent record sums on lobbying 5 years ago.
That'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 ...
My 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).
[flagged]
is that good
Everyone should be lobbying. It is the golden era of lobbying with 100% success rates. Whether you are in AI or the lettuce industry.
It 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.
It was so funny when Apple gave Trump an actual gold bar
I know many people who are using AI, but only a few are actually eating their lettuces, so I guess there's some conflict there