Anthropic, the AI startup approaching a potentially record-breaking IPO, has donated $900,000 to Democratic Party committees and voter-turnout efforts in California days before the midterm elections.
The New York Post reports that the donations show up in a filing made Friday with the California secretary of state. The California Democratic Party got the largest share, $525,000, and an independent statewide get-out-the-vote group received $150,000. Five county Democratic organizations, in San Francisco, San Mateo, Orange, Fresno and Siskiyou counties, each got $45,000.
That $45,000 is Anthropic’s only contribution to the San Francisco Democratic Party this election cycle. The local party has been spending heavily on competitive state Senate races outside the city.
Robin Swanson, a California Democratic Party spokeswoman, told the San Francisco Standard the money will “help us elect Democrats up and down the ballot, defeat the Trump-backed Prop. 39, and continue our robust voter-protection programs across the state.”
Anthropic’s IPO will enrich leftist movers and shakers like Eric Schmidt, as well as create a huge cadre of wealthy adherents to Effective Altruism (EA), but AI’s impact politically could go much deeper.
Breitbart News recently reported that a right-leaning nonprofit group has warned that AI could become a single source of information:
The Center for American Rights, a right-leaning nonprofit law firm focused on tech and telecom policy, filed an amicus brief in the copyright infringement case pitting OpenAI against a coalition of news organizations including the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The plaintiffs accuse OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, of stealing their content without credit or compensation to train its AI models. OpenAI's lawyers counter that the practice is protected under the "fair use" doctrine.
Daniel Suhr, president of the Center for American Rights, wrote the brief. The Article III Project and Internet Accountability Project, both led by Mike Davis, cosigned it, along with the Bull Moose Project, Consumers For A Strong Economy, and conservative lawyer Joel Thayer.
"If [superintelligence] is permitted to recklessly crawl the internet, even past paywalls, then we've effectively stripped these smaller companies of their competitive advantage and, worse, permanently solidified these SI companies as the ultimate distributors of our information," the brief states. It warns further: "This completely expurgates the incentive for any creator to want to provide free, open content and solidifies SI companies as our sole provider of news and entertainment." The filing calls that outcome "a terrifying prospect and completely at odds with the Trump Administration's goals of protecting copyright and a diversity of viewpoints (given Big Tech's track record of removing politically disfavored content)."
AI companies like Anthropic are just beginning to wield their political power. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the New York Post here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
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