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Greg Brockman stops paying into Leading the Future after $25 million of a $50 million pledge
OpenAI president Greg Brockman has stopped at $25 million of the $50 million he and his wife pledged to the Leading the Future super PAC. The stop followed objections from his own staff, while industry money keeps reaching the midterms through ads that mostly leave AI out.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Leading the Future told the Times in February that the second $25 million would arrive in the first quarter of 2026, but it came in neither the first nor the second quarter.
- In July, a group of OpenAI employees said they would pool more than $200,000 for the Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC set up to counter Leading the Future.
- Leading the Future still had about $43 million on hand at the end of June and had taken $50 million from Andreessen Horowitz, according to the Times.
- OpenAI is among the backers of the American Infrastructure Alliance, which Axios says will work with local politicians to head off data center moratoriums from next year.
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Why it matters
- decision Executives who give large sums in a personal capacity now have to plan for staff who treat the gift as company policy, because OpenAI's personal-capacity label did not settle the dispute inside OpenAI.
- contradiction OpenAI's public distance from outside political groups stops at one PAC, since its backing of a new anti-moratorium group keeps the company on the same side of the data center fight.
- precedent If AI-aligned PACs keep leaving AI out of their ads, voters angry about data centers will have little in the ads themselves to show which candidates the industry is backing.
In June, OpenAI employees opened a Slack message from their president about the super PAC some of them had criticised [4][11]. "I also want to say that I feel terrible about the fact that LTF keeps reflecting on the company and become so much of a distraction for people here," Greg Brockman wrote, according to the message obtained by the New York Times [5]. "I've been thinking hard about how to turn the ship on it," he wrote, in Gizmodo's account of the same report [6]. Then he gave the number: "We've donated $25m so far, and have no plans to donate more at this time." [7]
By Brockman's own account, the reversal was for "people here," meaning his staff [5]. Some employees had criticised the gift as an attempt by leadership to block AI regulation, the Wall Street Journal reported [11]. The money was already late when he wrote [2]. He never announced the change publicly [4]. A representative for the couple declined to comment to the Times, and so did Leading the Future [8].
Outside anger is in the record too. Gizmodo describes AI and data centers as a fault line for candidates in both parties, with some Republicans breaking from Trump to call for stricter guardrails [20]. More than 100 Democratic campaign staffers signed an open letter urging party leaders to refuse the PAC's donations [21]. Politico called the group "the Death Star" of AI politics [22]. The Guardrails Alliance, the rival PAC, says pressure from inside and outside OpenAI produced the reversal [14]. Brockman himself said in a May interview that he did not agree with all of the group's spending decisions, according to the Journal [12].
Leading the Future campaigned against candidates who favored stricter AI rules and data center moratoriums, and it campaigned successfully against New York assemblymember Alex Bores [19]. OpenAI's public position, posted ten days before the Slack message, was "We want to be explicit: No outside political group speaks for OpenAI or represents our company's views" [9]. It had also said Brockman's involvement was "in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company" [10]. None of the reporting describes a change in his other political ties. He and his wife gave $25 million to Trump's super PAC last year [16], and on Tuesday he signed Trump's AI accord for OpenAI [24].
What the evidence shows is one executive stopping one payment after his own staff objected. The rest of the money is still moving. Groups aligned with OpenAI and Anthropic have spent $55.7 million on 2026 congressional races, according to a Times analysis [17]. Of 95 ads the paper reviewed from four of those super PACs, none mentioned data centres and seven mentioned AI or an AI company [18]. That is about 7 percent [1].
A leadership team weighing political money near a product the public dislikes can ask two questions. The first is whether the executive would defend the gift to staff in writing. The second is whether the campaign's ads would name the product. Brockman's pledge failed the first, since his written message to staff was the decision to stop [7]. The ads in the Times review fail the second [18]. At OpenAI, the explanation reached the public through a Slack message the Times obtained [4].
What to watch
- Leading the Future's next donor disclosures, to see whether another backer replaces the $25 million the Brockmans withheld.
- Whether the American Infrastructure Alliance names its other backers and its first state campaigns when it starts work next year.
- Whether the Guardrails Alliance's employee-funded budget grows past $200,000 now that Brockman's reversal is public.