OpenAI President Backs Out of Pledged $25-Million Donation to AI Super PAC

OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman told employees he won’t make a pledged multimillion-dollar donation to a political group working to elect members of Congress who support pro-artificial intelligence policies.

Brockman and his wife donated $25 million to Leading the Future last September, and had committed to contributing another $25 million in 2026. Brockman said at the time he had made the donation in a personal capacity, but OpenAI employees criticized the move as an attempt by the company’s leadership to thwart sensible AI regulations.

Brockman sent a Slack message to OpenAI employees in June acknowledging the distraction his donation had created and saying he and his wife had no plans to go through with the second donation, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Leading the Future launched last year to support candidates for Congress who backed favorable regulation for the artificial intelligence industry and to push back against arguments that AI models must be regulated before they create catastrophic risks for society. In the year since the super PAC’s launch, AI has become an increasingly polarizing topic and is expected to be a top issue in this year’s midterm elections.

The pro-AI group launched with financial backing from Silicon Valley leaders including the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, the AI startup Perplexity, 8VC managing partner and Palantir Technologies PLTR 0.04%increase; up pointing triangle co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and SV Angel founder Ron Conway. The Brockmans were listed among the group’s marquee backers.

Leading the Future has made independent expenditures to support and oppose Republicans and Democrats running for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

Its highest-profile spending was in the Democratic Party primary for a congressional seat in Manhattan, which morphed into a bitter proxy fight over tech regulation.

An affiliate of Leading the Future spent more than $8 million against state assemblymember Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee who co-wrote one of the country’s strictest state AI laws, while groups that backed stricter regulation of AI companies spent millions more to support him. Bores finished second in the primary.

In June, OpenAI distanced itself from Brockman’s contributions to the super PAC, writing in a blog post that the couple made their contributions in a personal capacity and that the company didn’t direct the PAC’s activities or “have visibility into their operations.”

OpenAI employees have raised concerns about Brockman’s donations to Leading the Future in the past year. In July, several OpenAI employees announced they were donating more than $200,000 to the Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC created specifically as a counterweight to Leading the Future.

The Guardrails Alliance said in a statement it has been “leading the charge to prove Leading the Future is politically toxic and a liability” for public officials that receive the group’s support. “Now, thanks to internal and external pressure, Greg Brockman has backed out of his pledge to donate another $25 million to them.”

A representative for Leading the Future declined to comment. Brockman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Brockman’s withdrawal of his pledge was earlier reported by the New York Times.

Brockman said in an interview in May that he didn’t agree with all the group’s spending decisions but declined to discuss specifics.

He and Anna Brockman said in a statement to the The Wall Street Journal last year that they supported “AI centrism,” and were pushing for federal regulations to promote innovation, defend systems from misuse and protect “the privacy of conversations with AI.”

Beyond that, they said, “most developers and open-source models, and almost all deployments of today’s technology, should have minimal additional regulatory burden.”

News Corp, owner of the Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.