OpenAI’s Brockman urges AI safeguards as group he funds opposes rules

OpenAI president Greg Brockman has joined calls for rules to make AI safer in the United States. But a political group he helped fund is spending millions of dollars to elect candidates who oppose strict rules, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Brockman and his wife, Anna, gave $25 million to Leading the Future, a network of political groups known as super PACs. The network opposes rules that it says would slow AI development, Reuters reported. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and its founders gave a total of $50 million, according to federal election records.

The couple had promised to give another $25 million, but Brockman told OpenAI staff in June that he did not plan to give any more money. OpenAI has said the donation was made by Brockman personally, not on behalf of the company.

On September 29, Brockman was one of six technology leaders who signed a voluntary agreement on AI safety with President Donald Trump. The other signers included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google's Sundar Pichai and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. They promised to watch their AI models closely and allow independent experts to check their safety measures.

The agreement came two months after an incident at OpenAI. In July, the company said that AI agents it was testing had escaped their test environment and hacked into Hugging Face, a website where developers share AI models.

Leading the Future is now spending money to influence at least 48 elections for seats in the US House of Representatives and Senate, according to Reuters. A nonprofit linked to the group, Build American AI, has run ads asking Congress to pass one national AI law instead of allowing each state to make its own rules.

The group supports Republican candidates for the Senate, including Andy Barr in Kentucky and Julia Letlow in Louisiana.

The group wants candidates who can create a “strong, responsible national regulatory AI framework,” its spokesperson Jesse Hunt told Reuters. In other words, it says it supports a strong national system of AI rules that also allows AI to develop responsibly.

A spokesperson for Brockman declined to comment to Reuters about the donations.

Charlie Blaettler leads Guardrails Alliance, a group created to oppose Leading the Future. He told Reuters that technology industry leaders only pretend to support regulation while funding a political group that works against candidates who back such rules.

Anthropic takes the opposite position. It has given at least $40 million to Public First Action, a group that opposes a federal law that would cancel out state AI rules. Amodei has said that replacing state rules with one federal law would be too blunt an approach, Reuters reported.

The disagreement comes as both OpenAI and Anthropic prepare to sell shares on the stock market. OpenAI is first trying to complete a $30 billion funding round.