There have been several high profile incidents of OpenAI and a16z's super PAC Leading the Future (and its affiliate Build American AI) engag…

There have been several high profile incidents of OpenAI and a16z's super PAC Leading the Future (and its affiliate Build American AI) engaging in pretty egregious astroturfing. But it's also notable that part of why we know about the astroturfing is that it was conducted in an incredibly sloppy and slapdash manner for an organization with effectively unlimited cash. Some examples: • LTF by their own admission says a "third party vendor" they paid used a fake AI journalism platform "Acutus Wire" with stories written by bots, complete with a "Michael Chen" emailing apparently dozens of folks asking for comment and engagement on their AI written stories. This was found out by the Midas Project partially because the poorly coded Acutus website explicitly included a javascript file on the webpage which talked about "suggested questions for the AI interviewer to ask." • The journalist @TaylorLorenz found out about a program where Build American AI paid up to 5,000 per Tik Tok video to promote its content w/o disclosing the source of the payment. Lorenz writes: "WIRED first learned about the campaign after this article’s author was invited by SM4 to participate." So to be clear — Build American AI's vendor reached out to a well known journalist asking her to participate in its astroturfing campaign. • Campaign Legal Center recently filed a complaint to the FEC about Leading the Future potentially not complying with (pretty generous and relaxed!) election disclosure rules. In the complaint, it discusses the fact that Leading the Future's Democratic and Republican sub entities (Think Big and American Mission) paid the vast majority of their disbursements to LLCs created on the same day as one another, and do not appear to have any other clients. From the complaint: "Both LLCs were formed on the exact same day—October 30, 2025—and both identify their addresses as mail centers in Nevada. Neither LLC has a website or other digital footprint, nor do they appear to have other clients, despite being reported by Think Big and American Mission, respectively, as the payees for a full suite of consulting and advertising services... The overall record therefore indicates that these LLCs are not bona fide commercial vendors that provided the services attributed to them by Think Big and American Mission, but rather serve as payment clearinghouses for the super PACs to illegally conceal the true recipients of over 10.5 million in super PAC payments." • To close with a small issue, but my personal favorite: Build American AI ran ads on this platform that said we should "Put People over Profit" (a rather completely absurd thing for a massive anti regulation Super PAC to say). But in the (AI generated?) image they included for the ad about people over profit, it shows the money outweighing the people! The combination of functionally infinite money and crippling incompetence is a bit surprising, but not something that will necessarily last. As I wrote in my forthcoming book Obsolete (see bio): "The industry has a bottomless pit of money, which it uses to reward capitulation and punish resistance. But money is essentially its only advantage. AI’s reformers have the ideas, the principles, and the public sympathy. To overcome the money, we need to harden that sympathy into organization—to upend the political calculus, to make capitulation hurt worse than resistance."

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-05-07