Crypto’s Political Money Machine Finds a New Travel Companion: AI

The cryptocurrency industry didn’t just buy itself a seat at the political table in recent election cycles — it bought the whole table, several chairs, and apparently left a blueprint lying around for the next industry to copy. According to independent researcher and longtime crypto critic Molly White, that blueprint is now being picked up, almost line for line, by the artificial intelligence industry.

White, who has built a reputation for meticulously tracking where crypto-linked political money flows in Washington and in state races across the country, laid out the pattern in a recent interview on the Pivot to AI podcast. Her core observation: the same donor networks, the same super-PAC architecture, and in some cases the same operatives who helped crypto firms flood American elections with cash are now being redeployed to protect the interests of AI companies.

It’s a striking claim, and one worth taking seriously given how effective the crypto industry’s spending spree has already proven to be. Over the past several election cycles, crypto-aligned political action committees — most notably the Fairshake network backed by major exchanges and venture firms — have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into House and Senate races, rewarding crypto-friendly candidates and punishing skeptics regardless of party. The strategy was blunt and, by most accounts, successful: it reshaped how seriously lawmakers in both parties treat digital-asset regulation, turning what was once a niche policy issue into something candidates actively court.

Now, White says, a similar infrastructure is emerging around AI policy, with two of the industry’s biggest names reportedly backing competing super-PACs. OpenAI and Anthropic — companies that publicly compete on everything from chatbot capability to safety messaging — are apparently also competing in the murkier arena of campaign finance, each looking to shape how Congress regulates (or doesn’t regulate) the fast-moving AI sector.

That rivalry reportedly played out in miniature in New York’s 12th Congressional District, where, per White’s account, the dueling AI-aligned spending efforts stumbled over each other rather than delivering a clean win for either side. The episode is a small but telling data point: money alone doesn’t guarantee a coordinated political strategy, especially when the companies funding it are also jockeying against one another in the marketplace.

The broader significance here isn’t really about one House race. It’s about what happens when an entire industry — first crypto, now apparently AI — decides that the fastest path to a favorable regulatory environment runs through the campaign finance system rather than the policy process. Crypto firms spent years positioning themselves as the aggrieved underdogs of financial regulation, battling the SEC and arguing that unclear rules were strangling American innovation. Whatever one thinks of that framing, the political spending clearly moved the needle: crypto is now discussed in Congress with a seriousness, and a caution, that would have seemed unlikely a decade ago.

AI companies, flush with far more capital than most crypto startups ever had, appear to have taken note. If White’s tracking is accurate, the question for voters and regulators alike is no longer whether an emerging tech industry will try to buy political insurance — it’s how quickly, and how effectively, it can do so.

For now, much of this remains in the realm of documentation rather than definitive conclusion; White’s work is ongoing, and the full picture of AI’s political spending is still taking shape, much as crypto’s did years before anyone outside the industry was paying close attention. But the pattern she describes — industry money migrating from one hot sector to the next, carrying with it the same donors, the same consultants, and the same hardball tactics — suggests that the fight over how America regulates its next transformative technology may already be well underway, long before most of the public has noticed the money moving.