Introducing: AI Super PACs
It gets worse every single day
You may have noticed that I’ve been talking a lot on this Substack about AI making everything worse, and how Big Tech has put us into an incredibly hostile hostage situation in which all of us are sitting cross-legged at gunpoint, with every meal being literally shoved down our throats. Except there is no meal: it’s slop, generated by Sora, of a fake hot dog with dripping yellow AI cheese. Or maybe the hostage situation itself is AI-generated. I’m actually at the computer, staring at myself with six fingers on the floor with anime-inspired tears flying out of my eyes.
All of that is to say that the situation with the AI bubble, which 100% WILL burst, is running the risk of not only jumping the shark, but crashing into another boat altogether.
Take the reporting from the New York Times a few days ago that discovered a brand new 501(c)(4) group has been created to solve a problem you probably didn’t even know existed. The group is called Public First, and its goal is to funnel dark money into a pair of super PACs: a Democratic-leaning super PAC meant to fight AI known as Jobs and Democracy, as well as a Republican-leaning equivalent known as Defending Our Values PAC.
And what is the problem these PACs are looking to solve? Why, it’s to fight back against a pro-AI PAC known as Leading the Future, a PAC with $100 million stored away to get out the good word about artificial intelligence by backing candidates that are virulently pro-AI. Each group is led by teams of shady billionaires. On the anti-AI side are billionaire Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. On the pro-AI side are OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Andreesseen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, and Joe Lonsdale, one of the co-founders of Peter Thiel’s surveillance nightmare Palantir.
Do you remember earlier this month when I wrote about how we’re projected to spend $1.5 trillion on AI globally this year? It’s incredibly likely that number is about to get even worse, with Gizmodo reporting that the amount of money going into both pro- and anti-AI super PACs are “way beyond normal spending levels for businesses and “special interests” in the U.S..” According to them, the influential United Auto Workers’ PAC raised over $15 million for the 2024 election. These AI PACs are raising nearly ten times that amount!!!
AI Exposed as an Actual Scam
I’m pretty sure that AI is a massive money laundering scheme. I don’t have the evidence to support that theory, but it’s a dismantling of reality that has made things not only more annoying, but more low quality, too.Dean’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider bec…
“For an example of what AI PAC money looks like in action, look at its hostility earlier this month toward obscure New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, who is running for a House seat,” Mike Pearl wrote at Gizmodo. “Bores is the chief sponsor of a piece of New York legislation requiring AI companies to work on preventing “critical harms” from AI models, but he suddenly found himself and his bill becoming the target of billionaires on the other side of the country in California. Leading the Future vowed to spend millions keeping this one random guy out of Congress. Bores told the San Francisco Examiner he was under fire from “a specific, small part of Silicon Valley that has an extreme minority [viewpoint] that there should be no regulation of AI whatsoever,” and noted that “the fact that they are being so straightforward about that is something I’m thankful for.” Among Politicos, Bores is famous now.”
The reality is that so much money is being put into AI, whether it’s for the pro-factions or the anti-factions, that could be put into more important resources for the American people. The economy is collapsing, with the economy being hinged entirely upon California and New York alone. Tariffs have made it so Thanksgiving and Christmas reached historically high prices for Americans. People are broke, jobs are down, things are bad, and we’re dumping hundreds of millions into AI - or against it!
Just keep in mind that the 2026 elections are about to get really weird, and with the money that is being dumped into these super PACs, there’s a high likelihood that you are about to get really, really tired hearing about whether AI is good or bad… and ONLY whether AI is good or bad.
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I COMPLETELY agree Dean, good work with this piece. It really captured my attention.