Why Are AI Giants Betting Big on Washington, and What’s at Stake for the Future?

According to OpenSecrets, many AI companies have significantly increased their lobbying efforts on federal AI issues. In 2023, 458 companies spent on AI lobbying while 648 companies spent on AI lobbying in 2024. This is a 141% YoY increase in AI lobbying between 2023 and 2024. Companies like Microsoft and OpenAI have ramped up their efforts to influence AI-related legislation. CREATE AI Act, which focuses on benchmarking AI systems in the US and Advancement and Reliability Act which aims at creating a government center for AI research was backed up by Microsoft and OpenAI respectively.

OpenAI has increased its lobbying expenditure from $260,000 in 2023 to $1.76 million in 2024 while Anthropic’s lobbying expenditure increased from $280,000 to $720,000 in 2024. A startup named Cohere has also increased its budget to $230,000 in 2024 from $70,000 in 2022. OpenAI, Cohere and Anthropic collectively spent $2.71 million on federal lobbying in 2024, which is a significant increase from $610,000 being spent on federal lobbying in 2023. It is still small if we compare it to what large tech industries spent on lobbying in 2023 ($61.5 million).

In 2024, domestic policy making was a mess with Congress considering about 90 AI-related bills in the first half of the year but Congress didn't take any actions and asked the states to act independently. Some of the actions which were taken because of that were Tennessee becoming the first state to protect voice artists from unauthorized AI cloning, Colorado adopting a risk based approach to AI policy and California enacting multiple AI safety bills. But no state was successful in implementing AI regulations as good as the EU's AI Act.

It is still unclear whether there will be more actions on AI legislation this year as compared to last year at a federal level. President Donal Trump has recently ordered federal agencies to suspend Biden-era AI policies, even the export rules on AI models. Anthropic has urged the federal government to implement targeted AI regulation while OpenAI has also called for some government action on AI as well as its development and infrastructure.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World