OpenAI Employees Give $215,000 to a PAC Fighting Brockman’s Own Bet

More than $215,000 from current and former OpenAI employees has flowed into Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC pushing for tougher rules on artificial intelligence. The money puts rank-and-file researchers squarely against their own company’s president.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, has personally committed $25 million to Leading the Future, the rival super PAC fighting to keep AI regulation light. Leading the Future has won nearly every race it has entered this year.

The Engineer Behind the $200,000 Check

Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe has worked at OpenAI as a research engineer since 2022. In June, he wrote the largest known individual employee donation to Guardrails Alliance: $200,000.

He said the check followed four years spent studying how to reduce the societal risks of advanced AI systems.

In this time, I’ve become concerned that all that research will have gone to waste if it doesn’t translate to guardrails that hold private companies accountable for the responsible development of AI.

Cerón Uribe said in a statement to WIRED. He added that tech billionaires, “such as Greg Brockman, funded the super PAC Leading the Future to keep AI unregulated,” and called his decision to give “easy.”

Three other OpenAI staffers followed at a smaller scale. Gabriel Wu, a safety researcher at the company, gave $5,000, saying he wanted to push back against efforts to keep AI unregulated. AI alignment researchers Julie Steele and Jason Wolfe each donated the same amount.

Seven current employees and one former worker account for the $215,000 total, according to WIRED’s reporting. It is a fraction of what flows through either side of this fight.

OpenAI Insists the Politics Are Personal

The unease had been building since May, when employees pressed OpenAI’s global affairs chief, Chris Lehane, at a tense internal meeting over the company’s ties to Leading the Future. Current and former staff described the session as tense but productive.

On June 1, OpenAI published a statement distancing itself from the group. “OpenAI does not direct the activities of LTF, or have visibility into their operations,” the company said, adding that Brockman’s involvement “has been in a personal capacity, not on behalf of the company.”

The statement went further. “We have not made donations to any super PACs, and we do not have an employee-funded PAC,” OpenAI said, noting that staff remain free to donate or advise campaigns “in their personal capacities.”

Lehane had made a similar case to reporters weeks earlier. “That’s not OpenAI,” he said, describing the network as “a super-PAC as an independent thing that runs on its own.”

Not everyone inside the network agrees with that framing. Nathan Leamer, executive director of the Leading the Future-affiliated nonprofit Build American AI, told the outlet Transformer in early May: “For this project I’m funded by four separate entities … OpenAI is just one of them.”

Leading the Future’s spokesperson, Jesse Hunt, rejected that characterization outright. “Neither Leading the Future nor any affiliated super PACs or 501(c)(4) organizations has ever received funding from OpenAI,” Hunt said, adding that all decisions rest with co-leaders Zac Moffatt and Josh Vlasto.

Watchdog groups aren’t buying the separation. “They are two sides of the same coin,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, pointing to Lehane’s role advising on the network’s creation.

How Big Is the Gap Between the Two Sides?

Guardrails Alliance launched in mid-June with about $5 million and a goal of raising $15 million this election cycle. Leading the Future has received more than $140 million since committing an initial $100 million at its August 2025 launch. The employee gifts barely register against either total.

Shaunna Thomas, who co-founded Guardrails Alliance with fellow Democratic operative Leah Hunt-Hendrix, does not pretend otherwise. “What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about the way the anti-regulation AI tech sector is trying to manipulate elections,” she told reporters.

The funding gap has drawn regulatory scrutiny of its own. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint alleging Leading the Future affiliates were funneling payments through undisclosed shell companies to obscure how the money was actually spent.

Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival, has taken a different route into the same fight. It gave $20 million to the nonprofit behind Public First Action, which has raised $80 million and spent $20 million so far, though Anthropic says its contribution is restricted to public education rather than campaigning. Public First-affiliated PACs have separately spent $16.6 million on congressional races in states including North Carolina, Texas and Utah.

The Proxy Fight in New York’s 12th District

No race has drawn more of this money than the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York. Alex Bores, a state Assembly member and former Palantir employee, wrote the RAISE Act (Responsible AI Safety and Education), New York’s law requiring frontier AI developers to disclose safety protocols.

That authorship made him Leading the Future’s first and most aggressive target. His campaign also ran an ad featuring the parents of Adam Raine, a teenager whose family says he died by suicide after months of conversations with ChatGPT.

• Think Big, a Leading the Future affiliate, spent $7.6 million opposing Bores through a subsidiary.
• Guardrails Alliance countered with a $250,000 ad buy in the race’s final days.
• Jobs and Democracy PAC, tied to Anthropic-backed Public First Action, put in $2.3 million supporting him.
• You Can Push Back, funded by Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, added another $3.5 million on his behalf.

Independent researcher Molly White, a longtime tech industry critic, said the standoff “really mirrors the corporate competition between OpenAI and Anthropic” and their differing approaches to AI safety.

The Scoreboard So Far Favors Leading the Future

Despite the money, attention and internal dissent, Bores lost the Democratic primary, CNBC reported. It is the clearest test yet of whether dollars or grassroots anger decide these races, and the dollars won this round.

The wider tally looks similar. Leading the Future has backed 28 candidates so far this cycle. Twenty five have already won their primaries, two have yet to face voters, and only one, Jesse Jackson Jr., has lost.

• 25 of 28 candidates Leading the Future has backed have won their primaries, per a CNBC review of FEC data.
• $44 million has gone into 40 House and Senate candidates from the two biggest AI-focused super PACs through June.
• Only one Leading the Future-backed candidate has lost a primary so far.
• $200 million-plus raised combined by Leading the Future and Public First Action this cycle.

Public First Action’s Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, argues the two networks are not simple opposites. “They have a lot of benefits. They have a lot of dangers. And you can’t just release them into the wild with no government concern,” he said, adding that the sentiment now crosses party lines.

Leading the Future co-leader Josh Vlasto frames the spending as urgency, not obstruction. “It is so important that we do this now and urgently, because it is still the early innings of the technology, but it is being adopted quickly, at scale,” he said.

No Federal AI Law Yet

None of this spending has produced a single federal AI statute. A push this year to pass a moratorium on enforcement of state AI rules failed in Congress, and lawmakers on both sides say another attempt is likely.

Money is still arriving. A new Republican-aligned nonprofit, Innovation Council Action, has pledged $100 million more for the midterms, and Public First Action says it plans to spend across 50 to 60 races before November.

Public Citizen’s review of federal filings found corporate midterm spending topping $500 million across sectors this cycle, nearly a third of everything corporations have spent on elections since the 2010 Citizens United ruling.

OpenAI has its own reasons to want the noise contained. The company is fending off its own lawsuit over stolen hardware secrets as it and Anthropic both push toward initial public offerings later this year.

Congress still has not passed a federal law regulating artificial intelligence.