$300 million is buying the AI rules you’ll live under.
David Sacks wrote the White House’s AI policy, quit his government job last month, and is now the public face of 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 January 2025. 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 Advisers on Science and Technology, which is technically outside the government. 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 wrote the policy. Now he’s funding the people who’ll 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. 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 over $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 three times 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