More than 100 Democratic operatives urge party leaders to reject AI cash

More than 170 Democratic organizers and campaign staff members are calling on the party’s leaders to reject campaign donations from the pro-artificial intelligence super PAC Leading the Future (LTF) as the debate over AI safety and regulations intensifies in Washington.

The letter , first shared with The Hill on Friday, argues the millions of dollars from AI industry executives is “fundamentally at odds with the Democratic Party’s core values.”

“We are a party that values people over unchecked regressive power, that believes in the role of government in reining in corporate greed and that advocates for accountability and fairness in our economy,” the letter states.

Leading the Future is at the center of the AI industry’s campaign spending push. It has received millions from OpenAI President Greg Brockman, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI firm Perplexity and venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale.

Ezra Andres-Tysch, a Democratic strategist who helped organize the letter, said he hopes the letter “makes it easier for someone to go to their campaign manager or their candidate and say, why are we doing this?”

“Why are we, you know, taking money from these campaigns? Why are we holding these positions that aren’t popular?” he added.

“One of the reasons that I hope that this kind of breaks through is often campaign staff are that connection line to a candidate,” Andres-Tysch told The Hill. “I think often candidates live in their own little worlds, and then the campaign staff who are knocking on doors, talking to real people, can be that canary in a coal mine.”

It comes as concerns mount over the future of AI development and its potential impacts on jobs, the environment and national security. Earlier this week , more than a dozen Democratic congressional candidates started a new push to call on campaigns to refuse LTF’s money.

LTF has raised at least $140 million for the 2026 midterm election cycle. The spending group has donated to members on both sides of the aisle, maintaining its goal to “support a well-balanced, cross-partisan conversation about artificial intelligence.”

This “starts with passing a strong and thoughtful national regulatory framework,” the super PAC said in a statement earlier this year. “Our north star is to support a political environment where policymakers at the federal and state levels can tune out the extremes and engage thoughtfully on critical policy issues surrounding innovation in and adoption of AI.”

The super PAC says a framework should include safety protections for kids, baseline safety standards for frontier models, and commitments around AI literary and workforce training.

Following an AI researcher’s ominous warning about the technology, lawmakers in Washington scrambled this week to manage the abrupt panic around AI development, floating numerous proposals to prevent its negative potential.

Strategists in the Friday letter argued the technology “poses extreme risks to the public” and “requires clear guardrails to protect Americans and create accountability for tech companies that fail to adhere to basic guardrails.”

Commenting on past proposals, LTF said AI regulation deserves “rigorous debate as Congress works toward durable solutions that protect the public while accelerating American innovation and leadership.”

The list of signatories includes Alexander McCoy, a Democratic strategist working on AI issues, along with Sacha Haworth, director of the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit advocacy group seeking to break up Big Tech firms.