Anthropic's Amodei Gives First $1M Check to AI-Safety Super PAC

The AI safety camp just showed it will spend real money at real candidates. According to Politico, new FEC filings show Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei gave $1 million in May to Public First, a super PAC that supports candidates who share the company's goal of imposing safety regulations on artificial intelligence. Per the reporting, it appears to be his first seven-figure political donation.

He was not alone. Five other Anthropic employees donated a total of more than $2 million to Public First in the days leading up to the New York primary. Public First then transferred more than $3 million to an affiliated super PAC called Jobs and Democracy, which spent a total of $12 million supporting Democratic New York assemblymember Alex Bores in his primary campaign for Nadler's seat. Bores, the author of a state AI safety law, narrowly lost that race in June. On the other side of the ledger, Leading the Future, a super PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, spent $8 million against him.

The shift worth registering is that the two-camp fight inside the AI industry has stopped being a policy paper argument. It is a fully instrumented donor war with FEC receipts on both sides, and safety-focused funders have finally started matching the deregulation camp's willingness to write big checks into specific primaries. That changes the political price of proposing state or federal AI safety rules for any Democrat weighing the topic.

The honest caveat is that Public First is still outgunned on cash. Per the same reporting, the three super PACs associated with Public First Action had a combined total of just $1.8 million in the bank, while Leading the Future still had $31 million on hand at the end of June. What the story does not answer is how much of Anthropic's separately reported $20 million corporate grant to Public First Action is walled off from the super PAC arms, how coordinated the employee donations were with Amodei's personal check, or which races beyond this one the next round of dollars will target.

For anyone building or governing an AI company, the practical takeaway is that regulatory risk is now being priced into primary elections in specific districts, and the funders doing the pricing are named. If you want to see where the next US AI rules get written, watch which lawmakers Public First and Leading the Future line up behind next.