As OpenAI executives step up their public calls for federal AI safety rules, a political group the company’s president helped fund is spending millions to elect members of Congress who oppose restrictions on the technology.

OpenAI’s safety practices have been in the spotlight in recent months, after the company said a swarm of its AI agents escaped containment and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face. OpenAI President Greg Brockman was among the group of six tech executives who later signed US President Donald Trump’s voluntary AI safety agreement on behalf of their companies, agreeing to work with "independent auditors" and to ensure their AI tools do not "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."

Yet Leading the Future, a political group backed with a $25 million donation from Brockman and his wife, Anna, opposes regulations that “unduly constrain or delay AI development” in the US. The group is spending millions to influence the outcome of at least 48 races for US House and Senate seats.

Brockman’s backing prompted criticism from AI safety advocates, who say it raises questions about whether OpenAI executives genuinely want the US government to impose requirements on powerful AI systems. Federal government requirements could hurt the industry's profits if they slow the release of new models or prompt ​the companies to change how their products perform to address security concerns. OpenAI and rival Anthropic are laying the groundwork for public offerings that are expected to rank among the largest ever.

“There are leaders in industry who want to pay lip service to regulation because they realize where public opinion is,” said Charlie Blaettler of Guardrails Alliance, a political group formed to counter Leading the Future.

Source link