AINEWS
FEC filings for Q2 2026 (April 1 – June 30) show AI lab employees gave $2.02M to Democrats and $274K to Republicans. Inside one of those labs, the workforce and the C suite are placing opposite bets.
AI laboratory employees gave $2.02 million to Democratic-aligned groups and $274,000 to Republican-aligned ones in the second quarter of 2026, according to FEC filings reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. OpenAI's workforce took the lean further: every dollar of the roughly $296,000 in individual contributions and PAC donations from its staff went to Democratic candidates or groups, with nothing to Republicans.
The five-company aggregate covers OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and xAI for the period from April 1 through June 30, 2026. The labs are not interchangeable. Google employees gave 72.4% of $608,000-plus to Democrats and 1.8% to Republicans, per the FEC records aggregated by Transformer News. Meta employees split 65% Democratic and roughly 22% Republican on $245,000 in giving. Anthropic's $1.616 million leaned 68.8% Democratic and 12.9% Republican.
In 2025, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife donated a combined $25 million to Maga Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, according to The New York Times via the Daily Caller. The workforces of major AI labs are not donating as one bloc with their executives. The Brockman gift is the cleanest illustration; the next quarter's filings will say whether it is the only one.
Of the roughly $225,000 in PAC money OpenAI employees routed through their giving vehicle, $200,000 went to DreamNYC, a New York state PAC that spent $2.48 million in independent expenditures, 100% of it supporting Alex Bores, a Democratic New York assemblyman running for the U.S. House in 2026, per FEC filing C00928069. Bores lost the June primary. He is also one of Albany's most prominent advocates for AI safety legislation. That a workforce inside a frontier AI lab would bet $200,000 on a single House race is the part an aggregate tally does not capture. The bet targeted a lawmaker whose day job is regulating the technology they were building.
Anthropic's employee-funded PAC, AnthroPAC, complicates the read. Independent journalist Jacob Wendler reported on July 14, 2026 that AnthroPAC raised more than $275,000 in Q2 with a 55/45 Republican-to-Democratic contribution mix. That figure appears to conflict with Anthropic's 68.8% Democratic aggregate. The two are measuring different things: the 68.8% number covers all employee individual contributions plus PAC money across FEC line items, while the 55/45 figure is a snapshot of the PAC's own outgoing contribution mix in a single quarter. Both are real, and the difference is a reminder that "AI lab giving" can mean several different denominators depending on which line of the filing you read.
The donor ledger behind DreamNYC is a roll call of the AI donor class. The single largest contribution to the PAC was $790,000 from Daniel Ziegler of Anthropic. Juan Ceron Uribe of OpenAI gave $200,000. The Transformer News tracker shows OpenAI individuals alone have routed $13.14 million into AI-related political spending vehicles, including $12.5 million to the super PAC Leading The Future, a sum that dwarfs any single quarter's individual line items.
The SF Standard framed the wave as "AI's new political donor class already outspending Big Tech's last one." The pattern in the FEC's current snapshot is more specific: the workforce totals lean heavily Democratic, and the gaps between the workforce and some of its most prominent donors are visible in the line items. The next quarter's filings, due in October, will say whether the split widens or closes.