$300 million is buying the AI rules you’ll live under.
David Sacks helped write the White House’s AI policy, left his government job last week, and is now championing a $100 million PAC designed to elect the people who’ll keep that policy in place.
That’s the whole scam, and he did it in about a year.
Let me catch you up. Trump named Sacks his AI and crypto czar in December 2024. Sacks spent the year inside the White House shaping the administration’s approach to artificial intelligence – push hard on deregulation, block state-level oversight laws, build data centers fast, frame everything as a race against China.
Then he stepped down and moved over to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a White House advisory panel of tech and science leaders. And now there’s this new group called Innovation Council Action, founded by Taylor Budowich (former Trump deputy chief of staff, former head of the MAGA Inc. super PAC), with David Sacks’s explicit blessing, planning to spend over $100 million on the 2026 midterms specifically to elect candidates who will do exactly what Sacks spent the last year setting up.
He helped write the policy. Now he’s championing the group that’ll fund the people who protect it. That’s not lobbying, that’s just completing the circuit. This is the exact same playbook that so many pro-crypto politicians used to get elected back in 2024. Spend a ton of money to get people who will do your bidding in non-competitive areas – targeting low information voters.
And Sacks’s operation isn’t even the biggest one. Marc Andreessen, Greg Brockman, and Joe Lonsdale are backing a group called Leading the Future that’s raised $125 million, according to the Financial Times. Meta has its own pro-AI super PAC planning to spend around $65 million focused on state races. Add it all up and the AI industry has committed close to $300 million to the 2026 midterms, all pointed in the same direction: no state laws, no federal guardrails, one national framework that the industry basically writes itself. And they’ve already won 10 of 11 congressional primaries where they spent money this cycle.
Ten out of eleven.
The framing they use publicly is “America vs. China.” Regulation slows us down, China wins, your grandkids speak Mandarin, whatever. Again, it’s the EXACT same argument the crypto industry used in 2024 to spend its way into a friendly Congress, and it worked so well that AI is now running the same play with more than twice the money.
What’s wild is that the voters aren’t actually demanding this. Polling this cycle shows bipartisan skepticism toward AI, with more Republicans than Democrats saying they want some oversight. The demand for deregulation is not coming from the public. It’s coming from the people spending $300 million to make sure the public doesn’t get to decide.
The stuff they’re trying to keep unregulated isn’t abstract. It’s whether your employer can use AI to monitor you at work. It’s who’s liable when an AI system gives bad medical advice or gets someone fired. It’s what happens to your data. It’s the energy and water being consumed by data centers going up in every state. Those are real questions about how people’s actual lives work, and right now the only organized, funded effort to answer them is coming from the industry that profits from one set of answers.
Taylor Budowich, to his credit, was pretty straightforward about all of it. “The cavalry is coming to back up the policymakers who stand with the president and will hold accountable the ones who don’t,” he told Fox News.
At least he said it out loud.
Sources- New pro-AI group preps $100M midterm blitz to boost Trump’s agenda
- New pro-AI group backed by Trump allies plans $100M midterm spending push
- Trump allies launch $100M AI group as industry midterm spending tops $300M
- Pro-AI group to spend $100 million on United States midterm elections
Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said David Sacks quit his government job last month – he announced the end of his term on March 26th, five days before this ran. It said he wrote the White House’s AI policy and is the public face of the new group – he co-wrote the AI Action Plan with two other officials, and he endorsed the group but holds no formal role in it. It said Trump named him czar in January 2025 – it was December 2024. It said the AI industry had committed over $300 million, all pushing one way – the money pushing that way is closer to $290 million. That’s a bit more than twice what crypto’s super PAC spent in 2024, not three times. And the first source link was labeled with a different site’s headline. It also said the council he moved to is technically outside the government – it’s a White House advisory council, and Fox Business reported the move expanded his role in the administration. And it said he’s funding the people who’ll protect his policy – he’s championing the group that plans to. The headline now says the same.
Update, September 27th, 2026: The Leading the Future figure now says where it comes from.
Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.