AI PACs Pour Nearly $1 Million Into Mike Rounds Race as Senate Readies AI Rules
Updated
Updated · WIRED · Sep 18
AI PACs Pour Nearly $1 Million Into Mike Rounds Race as Senate Readies AI Rules
2 articles · Updated · WIRED · Sep 18
Summary
$815,000 in AI-linked money has flowed to Republican Senator Mike Rounds’s South Dakota race, including about $600,000 from outside groups and roughly $215,000 from employees and PACs tied to Anthropic, Google and Microsoft.
AI labs and investors are backing Rounds because they see him as a key industry ally ahead of a Congress expected to make AI regulation a top priority, even though his race is currently noncompetitive.
Leading the Future, a super PAC backed in part by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and investors Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, said Thursday it will spend another $2 million on Senate Republicans supportive of AI or crypto, including Rounds.
South Dakota has already become a test case for the industry fight: lawmakers this year made hyperscalers shoulder more data-center water and energy costs and blocked some tax breaks, helping stall an Applied Digital project.
That local backlash mirrors a broader national constraint on AI expansion, with a recent Gallup poll finding 7 in 10 Americans oppose data-center development over water and power demands.