Silicon Valley corporations and investors, emboldened by President Trump’s embrace of the technology and crypto industries, have pledged up to $200 million to two new super PACs that are aimed at forcing out politicians whom they see as insufficiently supportive of the push into artificial intelligence.
One of the new PACs, Meta California, is funded by tens of millions of dollars from Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram and has been investing heavily in A.I. The second super PAC, Leading the Future, is backed initially with $50 million from the A.I. investor Andreessen Horowitz and $50 million from Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI, and his wife, Anna.
The first-of-their-kind groups reflect a new appetite for political combat from the A.I. industry, which is a relatively new policy area without clear partisan allegiances.
Meta, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others are shoveling tens of billions of dollars into developing A.I. models, building data centers, hiring top researchers and taking a lead in the technology. At the same time, the companies face questions over whether A.I. might take away people’s jobs and whether the technology is safe, as well as mounting concerns over the environmental effects of data centers….