AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying
ft.com
ft.com
Never ceases to amaze me how cheap lobbying is. That's pocket change for these companies.
This should be a basic fact. If those who spend a good portion of time being angry at lobbyists yet intelligent enough to make mid-six figures conflate bribery with lobbying, it should be no surprise the corporations have captured the government. The general public has essentially zero civic understanding while corporations are able to hire the few that do.
I don't think these are the only expenses, why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
Mostly because those things are directly illegal. Lobbying organizations (and PACs and SuperPACs etc.) are very limited in what they can provide either as direct monetary contributions or in-kind gifts to a candidate. The restrictions here are basically the same as those on an individual, but usually with more strict reporting requirements and lower limits.
The marketing aspect is the only thing that they can legally provide, and that's less a lobbying function than a PAC function, and they are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign or the candidate on this.
Ah yes, said politician will just host a $100,000 a head luncheon so nobody is “bribing” them. That would be dirty.
That is, they can hold such a lunch, but they can't pocket the money personally or even have the money contributed towards their campaign. Pocketing the money personally is just bribery, having it contribute to their campaign would violate the contribution limits (typically ~$10,000 per election max, though less than that in reality because the limit is split between primary and general).
You're right to be slightly suspicious because these lunches do exist. But they don't go to the campaign or the candidate, they can go to PACs and SuperPACs or to the party. In tern, PACs and SuperPACs cannot give this money to the candidate or the campaign (same limits as above with higher reporting requirements) and cannot coordinate campaign messaging.
This is not to say that corruption doesn't exist -- just that this simplistic form of it does not exist. You'll have to dig deeper than looking at lobbying activities to find the actual corruption, and it's usually masked in revolving door arrangements, speaking fees, and bulk sales of vanity books. But none of that can go through the typical lobbying system because it's too tightly regulated and tracked.
Seems you have to go all out before the comprendes?
Let them publicly say whatever they're preaching to politicians, and instead of 'funding' politicians directly, let them just teach everyone all at once.
I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
Why any lobbyists should have 1:1 time with a politician, what are they hiding?
For one thing because it’s a right in the First Amendment, there next to freedom of religion and speech.
If you have a grievance, you have a right to petition to have it redressed. Like other rights recognized in the Constitution, courts have interpreted it broadly, to include such things as a right for a private citizen to meet 1:1 with a willing public citizen.
Different people (including politicians) have different priorities, assumptions, biases, etc. The argument that convinces one person won't land with someone else. The true value of a lobbyist is her ability to understand what a politician values, and present the argument that is convincing to him.
As an example: I met an EU citizen who thought fishing with hooks was immoral. It seemed cruel to her to put a hook in the fish's face. She traveled to the US to ask senators to ban it. Amazingly, she went to a few effective altruist meetups, networked her way into contacting the staff of two US senators, and managed to get meetings with both of them. But neither one introduced legislation for her.
What arguments could she have made?
1. The vegan argument: It is wrong to eat animals or make them suffer.
2. The environmental case: Humans should leave nature alone.
3. The public safety case: Some rivers have toxins that may accumulate in fish. Only a strict licensing system can keep people from fishing in polluted rivers, selling the fish to people who don't know the river had bad stuff in it, and getting sick.
<<I could come up with many more, but you get the idea...>>
"Senator X cares about the environment. Make the environmental case, and he is likely to listen to you. His constituents are not interested in veganism, and he wins elections by talking about standing up for the interests of ranchers. The vegan argument will not work, do not bring it up!"
Tailoring arguments to your audience can be dishonest if you take it too far. Not tailoring your argument at all is certain to fail: US Senators are busy. Handing them a 60 item list of all possible arguments, some of which they think are crazy, will cause them to ignore you.
this is also good for documenting and tracing arguments and facts.
> I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
Thanks for bringing AIPAC up because it illustrates my point. AIPAC has plenty of publicly available material for you to read. It's not going particularly specific, but it most likely broadly aligns with what their lobbyists discuss with politicians: Israel is a valuable intelligence partner, aid to Israel brings stability in the Middle East, Iran is a destabilizing force that needs to be kept in check, etc.
How much merit do these arguments have? Maybe some. Maybe little at all. Even so, there is no mistaking that APAIC is talking about Earth here. The same cannot be said about the pro Palestinian side in America. "Stop funding genocide" is a fundamentally contradictory. The entire basis for a overwhelmingly better armed Israel giving Palestinians any sort of autonomy at all rests on American security commitments to Israel.
If the only motivation you can ascribe is making money or relection, it is circular. Wealthy people spend money to become politicians.
Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning? do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC? or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
What do politicans want to learn from Military Industrial complex or AIPAC lobby for example? What's there, that politicians don't know already?
They need to be ‘reminded’ of the issues that ‘campaign contributions’ are contingent upon.
> Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning? > do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC? > or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
Trump is unusually sure of himself. But no man rules alone: There is a massive org under every president trying to run a government. I know for a fact that people two levels of management under Trump (i.e. Trump is their manager's manager) do take meetings with people who lobby on the issue of health care policy and (for and against) military procurement. I would be shocked if people who are for/against working with Isreal are never in a room with anyone who can set policy.
Imagine that it is your job to come up with policy for a bug expensive government program: The VA hospital system, a military procurement program that buys airplanes, the part of the state department focused on MENA, etc. If someone asks to meet, claiming that they did academic/technical work which shows you can get a better result with a policy change, you will take that meeting. Examples:
1. An MD researcher shows you can cut drug costs by switching one medication for another.
2. An engineer has reason to believe current stealth coatings on fighter planes won't work against China's missiles in 5 years.
3. An economist thinks that an ally (Isreal, Korea, etc.) have demographics that will stop them from being able to field an army within 20 years.
Most people in government want to solve problems (and get credit for doing so). Most problems governments face have hard tradeoffs that voters don't understand/care about. Voters want unlimited healthcare at no cost to themselves, 100% success thwarting terrorists with no spying on citizens, military supremacy without paying much for weapons, etc. People asked to solve these problems are DESPERATE for new ideas to allow voters to see that they are getting good outcomes. Telling them you have a way around a hard tradeoff is music to their ears.
Yes it sucks. But this is a human problem. Not a US gov problem.
Lobbyists are in the business of wafting. It is quite enough for them to bring credible rumors of corporate agenda and plans to spend in pursuit of them. Political entrepreneurs will move to capture that spend without a single back-alley transaction involving burlap sacks of cash with comically large $ signs printed on the side. It has the same effect, though.
>some humanities or social science majors
this? Im sensing some meaning towards you calling out their degrees.
Your comment implies you have some deep civic understanding so can you expland on what your POV is? Im not american and would like to konw.
I think its entirely reasonable that the industries affected by regulations spend money to combat incorrect information like water usage of data centers.
Provide them a bigger budget to hire their own staffers, who can do research?
Produce more non-partisan, publicly-funded research, data, and surveys?
Make them study themselves? How do judges get informed on topics they attempt to pass judgement on?
They get expert witnesses. They certainly don't "do their own research"
Exhibit A: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
- The AARP ($21M annual spend) has 38M members
- The National Association of Realtors ($54M annual spend) has 1.5M members
- The American Medical Association ($24M annual spend) has 300K members
Of course that doesn't mean that their interests necessarily align with your interests.
``` Core Legislative PrioritiesMedicare Reform:
Fighting to fix stagnant physician payment formulas and account for inflation.
Prior Authorization: Pushing to reduce administrative roadblocks and delays enforced by insurance companies.
Scope of Practice: Opposing laws that expand independent clinical roles for non-physicians like nurse practitioners and pharmacists.
Burnout Reduction: Supporting federal and organizational relief to help doctors manage workplace stress and administrative tasks.
-- Public Health and Science
Public Health Crises: Supporting science-based policies on vaccinations, gun violence prevention, and chronic disease reduction.
Digital Health: Guiding regulations for artificial intelligence and telehealth integration in medical practices ```
Most of these are about keeping the gate (i.e., doctor's compensation high). The US doctors are the highest paid in the world (among developed countries like UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by a long shot. Kind of mad if you think about it.
Disclaimer: My spouse is a specialist doctor. You can say I have selfish interest in keeping doctor's salaries high in the US. But I can't help highlighting that doctor's guilds (like AMA) are part of the reasons why the healthcare expenses are so high in the US.
Quality of life (at work) for many physicians is arguably pretty bad due to long hours, administrative requirements, and insurance requirements / prior auth. Physicians should lobby to get some of these things fixed by regulation, because it's likely the only way they will get fixed! However, a physicians lobby of any kind is going to have a tough time reducing healthcare costs because they have a significant financial incentive to gatekeep and their members can pay high dues to spend a lot on lobbying.
I wonder if the AI meant PAs instead of pharmacists -- as I understand it, a pharmacist's scope of practice is quite distinct from a physician.
Besides, if I were to gather up 4 million to lobby, the opposition would simply spend 8 million instead which they could come up with just as easily. They don't have to outrun the bear, the just have to outrun you.
j/k, but then again, it's not like we have other means to "help make good governance decisions" that we haven't already tried before. Maybe except the failed cybernetics experiments that came a little before their time and in the wrong political regime, but then those are effectively replicated by any large multinational internally to some extent.
the ~$2M just gets your foot in the door, that's it.
Over $5 billion was spent on lobbying in 2025 [3].
To truly move policy you need to get pliable representatives first and that's not just money. There is a pipeline here. First, you get the right connections. That could be coming from a wealth family, be the nephew or grandson of some politician, do your time as a staffer or whatever. Going up through the ranks acts as a giant filter to make sure you will maintain the status quo. So you have to find candidates to run for these offices who have been weeded out by the existing processes. And if you don't have enough of them, the DNC or RNC will spend selectively against you in the primary and general election. And an increasing number of races have over $100 million spent on them.
Buying back democracy would be very, very expensive.
And then after all that there's the income and jobs pipeline. Your children get six-figure jobs with think tanks and interested companies. You leave office and get placed on boards of large companies. You can't compete with that.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/media-advertising/articles/2026-el...
[2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5818507-gop-super-pac-...
They primarily only get headlines for outrage topics when people don’t like what they’re pushing toward. Many of the top PACs are from groups like realtors or sheet metal workers lobbying for their interests.
Most people skip PACs and donate straight to political candidates instead. Individual donations to candidates outweigh anything the AI companies are spending by a huge number.
Spell out the details: Exactly who will not be permitted to speak under your definition of "freedom"?
If you say that only people with a billion dollars can be punished for speaking: Do you think the limit won't be lowered over time?
If the issue is that no person should be able to spend more than N million dollars in one "conversation", how do you allocate broadcast licenses when the price in an auction would be more than N million?
Do you understand the basics of a free society, which include freedom of association? You don't have much of a democracy left if you remove that.
I don't feel more free at all on account of that ruling. Maybe if you said "freedom" one or two more times, that would do the trick.
The above from Wikipedia.
But I'm wasting my time talking to you, you are just raging and putting words into other people's mouths, because you are too high on your own supply of resentment to want to have a good discussion.
I'll put my opinion clearly: Everybody should have the freedom of association and be able to get together with likeminded to work for any political cause they want to advance, as long as they do it within the limits of just law.
Political donations by large groups of special interests aren't unique to America. Many countries have very strong labour union super-PACs.
No, these do not make me feel free.
Search for “Wire transfer of” to jump to them.
Plus a couple of $1,666,667 which stand out in contrast to all the zeroes.
Everything that we want to do can be done through ordinary collaboration with no need for the state. The special services which the state provides (violence and threats of violence, imperialism, inhibition of movement of people and goods across imaginary lines, etc) are the kinds of things that are really only interesting to the kinds of people who are already spending their money on lobbying.
"Pro business is pro business" was my reply to your naive "Pro business is pro consumer" declaration of faith.
My second sentence clarified that my first sentence carried no judgement of businesses. That's just their nature, it's what they do.
Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers. It’s helping them identify where the pre-existing political fault lines are and arming them with ammo for fights that will play out according to existing ideological positions. “K Street lobbyists” don’t even bill at the rates you see for corporate lawyers. $3 million per six months is what a company like Anthropic might burn in a single B2B lawsuit.
And how does one get the access to do that?
Because you need meat puppets to identify what arguments are going to be compelling to which politicians, and go into an office and spoon feed it to the staffers.
> Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.
If that were true, then the price of doing that would get bid up. It's extremely rare that you have an issue where there's not people with deep pockets on both sides of the issue.
No. It is not. For starters, ask anybody who works at a DC restaurant or sporting venue.
People need to look at financial kick backs. There is a certain guy here in central Europe who left politics quite recently, but suddenly has 400 million euros wealth - out of nowhere. And nobody questions how he got that ...
The corruption happens not only via direct lobbyism. One has to look at the whole corruption bribe bubble here.
I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).
Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.
My ex was around when they worked on Obamacare. There were a lot of really good ideas floating around that had broad buy-in but then the super partisans and corrupt (say Lieberman and Baucus) destroyed it and created a big, but profitable for some, mess.
And with the increased spending after Citizens United it's only going to get worse.
Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.
I don't think biased information is a total dead end, but the onus is just on judges and politicians to tease out information from more than one angle. And often they don't.
> Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance
They are inherently incapable of identify all these companies or measure the impact of their policies on their own, though (which is perfectly understandable, well I guess these days they can use an LLM to make this easier... /s)
https://www.forbes.com/2008/01/10/jpmorgan-consultancy-advis...
It's buying dinners so you can talk with a Representative or Senator one-on-one. It's traveling to D.C. or the Congressperson's home state. It's paying for studies and etc to support your points. It's financing campaigns of politicians who already agree with your viewpoints. It's not "here's money, make law".
> "Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
>Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year.
The return on "lobbying" for corporations is immense, actually, it's a bit of a high cost, high return with some risks type of dynamic; but especially in the Beltway bandit den and increasingly in the silicon cartel valley they have worked out a systematic methodology for bamboozling and manipulating utterly inadequately prepared bureaucrats squandering other people's money with approaching zero consequences. No, even they not only don't face consequences, they are promoted faster the better and faster they can squander money and enrich friends and associates.
Forget the lobby, the parlor is where it's at.
In my experience, yes, it is actually wanted. But, it's not enough to just offer to help. Legislative processes are very very human -- i.e., you have to spend time in person, meeting people, getting to know people, remembering their names and faces and trivia about them, building relationships. When you're not doing that, you have to be making informational materials. And when you're not doing that, you have to be building influence in whatever community or subject area you're trying to represent the interests of.
It would be really wonderful to see more people with the means to do so getting involved in this way. One of the reasons everything seems to be getting worse in so many areas is that most of the people doing this work aren't doing it on behalf of the interests of the average person.
I'm not American. Lol
I should see if there are similar things for Canada
If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers?
Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad.
The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.
And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.
Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.
And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?
> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so
You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.
My quick summary is that I don’t think only wealthy people/companies should have their voices heard. I just don’t think that attempting to squash lobbying or even “money in politics” is the means to achieve it.
I’ve called my congressman/senator a few times to speak for/against something, and it’s made me wish it was easier for citizenry to meaningfully band together. Im glad I had someone to call, but it was certainly not the access that a fancy political dinner would have afforded me.
I despise and fear corruption, and agree that there an overlap between lobbying and bribery/kickbacks. And I don’t think buying the sitting president’s meme-coin should purchase access. But of course we have (had) laws against such blatantly poisonous arrangements. And many legal arrangements are not much better.
So I don’t mean to say that all “lobbying” is good in all forms, but the term has become so conflated with other illegal or borderline activities, that it’s actually lost meaning, and is actively harming our ability to meaningfully discuss it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this conflation benefits the very criminals that we wish to shut down.
When someone uses ambiguous terms like “money in politics” or “lobbying” to mean everything from running a newspaper ad to slipping someone an envelope full of cash, we will see calls for blunt instrument fixes. Those fixes usually benefit incumbents and existing power structures, and often happen to make it illegal to amplify one’s speech. There are plenty of countries that have very little legal money in their political system, but they also don’t have elections that can be swayed in the first place.
We would see less money in politics if the government was weaker and could not sway an individual’s or company’s fortunes by millions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, or declare that encrypted communications are illegal, or decide that certain ethnic groups are no longer welcome. But since they can, many companies or individuals or civil liberties groups will do the math and purchase whatever insurance they can to increase the chance their side is heard, whether we agree with that side or not.
I wish I had better proposals to fix the things we agree are bad, because we probably agree on a lot of it. I am mainly trying to call out that saying someone or some group is “lobbying” is NOT the same thing as accusing someone of being inherently corrupt, and the fact that it “sounds” like it is just benefits the actually obvious corrupt criminals and disadvantages anyone else who would want to use money to advocate for a position.
I certainly don’t think that this should be the only way to talk to a lawmaker! I should be able to schedule time to go meet with my representatives or his/her people. I should also be able to pay someone to do so on my behalf.
I’m not familiar with the Citizen’s Initiative approach! I’ll look into it, and agree we should have more organized and official ways of doing it. I have called my congressman and senator’s office a couple of times in the US, and it doesn’t feel very productive. I wish it was easier to organize a group to make our concerns known.
Speaking of the EU, I have been surprised to watch the ChatControl stuff keep resurfacing and be struck down over and over and over again. It feels very much like the “government” wants something that the citizens and their private companies do not. Perhaps it is a result of lobbying for it by private interests, but it seems like an effort by the current powers that be to overstep what people would otherwise want to “lobby against”.
That said, this is how the US works now. It might have started with military-industrial companies, but it is basically wide spread. Unfortunately, once the taboo is broken, it is broken permanently.
It's a dangerous gamble, and bad for the US. But, given how cheaply many of our politicians can be purchased and how much money is flowing into the leading AI companies (and a bunch of also-rans), I guess we should expect to see them rolling the dice on that gamble.
Effective altruism has some data that suggests it works marginally for state leglislators but works quite well for undecided federal officials.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oStggnYLGzomhvvn/...
There are ways to fix this, in theory, but our government has passed the point of no return with corruption.
There is one solution: no one register as a democrat or republican: this would make the dirty D.C. system a little harder to corrupt the system.
Unfortunately, people let their emotions guide them in thinking about political parties. Most people are idiots who can’t see how they are divided into two groups and manipulated.
Too bad, this used to be a nice little country we had.