AI Influence Spending Booms, Signaling Monumental Clashes Ahead

Disrupting jobs, fueling a data center boom, even killing off this em dash—artificial intelligence is the conversation policymakers, and the rest of us, just can’t escape.

That’s especially the case in Washington, where spending on federal AI influence hit an all-time high last year. Lobbying firms reported a record $37.2 million in earnings from AI-related influence peddling in the fourth quarter alone, a 38% jump from a year earlier, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis.

For the full year, Washington lobbyists received almost $130 million for work related to AI, as Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google led the spending blitz. Some of the biggest jumps came from frontier labs OpenAI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, two of the highest valued startups in history vying to shape the AI industry’s future and most recently engulfed in a dispute over its use within the US military.

Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, efforts to control how the tech is used, regulated, developed, sold, and exported have grown exponentially. K Street amassed nearly $300 million in revenue for AI work since the start of 2023, the quarter after ChatGPT’s release and former President Joe Biden unveiled his administration’s “AI Bill of Rights” consumer protection framework.

“The impact that AI is going to have on the world and the United States is so big and the debate in DC is already big, but it’s only going to get bigger,” said Josh Ackil, a founder of the tech lobbying firm Franklin Square Group. “I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.”

Just the Beginning

K Street insiders expect that the jump is just the beginning of big spending on the issue. Battles have broken out across the country over building energy-sucking data centers needed to power the market, which could reach $4.8 trillion globally by 2033, according to a United Nations analysis.

“The ChatGPT moment was real for a lot of folks and became a focus point for everyone,” said Joel Richard, who chairs the technology practice at Invariant. “It’s more than just an issue for tech policy folks—every sector, every component of government and industry is really seeking to position themselves in Washington, either to secure advantages in the marketplace or to secure government contracts.”

Read More: AI Lobbying Soars in Washington, Among Big Firms and Upstarts

AI bleeds into every industry, from energy to health care, defense to education and, of course, technology.

“There is no such thing as an AI client,” said Keenan Austin Reed, CEO of the Alpine Group where clients include Palantir Technologies Inc., Whoop Inc., and the Recording Industry Association of America. “Every client has AI embedded now.”

“It is now the ultimate multidisciplinary issue,” said Alex Vogel, founder of the Vogel Group, whose clients include NVIDIA Corp., the chip-maker and now most valuable public company in the world with a market cap on Monday of $4.4 trillion. When it comes to building the new data centers, he said, “It is hand-to-hand combat on actually getting these projects up and running.”

Big Tech has paid mightily to maintain close ties to President Donald Trump’s White House, which has so far employed a hands-off approach to regulating the AI sector. The administration has voided Biden-era safety restrictions, moved to preempt state AI laws, approved the sale of sophisticated AI chips to China, and aligned itself with Silicon Valley investors eager to accelerate America’s push to win the so-called AI race.

“Because AI is a historical general-purpose technology that scales human capabilities and will impact all walks of life—akin to the printing press, combustion engine, electricity, the transistor—everyone should care about AI policy,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said in a text message.

Expanding Influence

Tech giants’ AI influence spending also reaches far beyond K Street. Tech executives have donated millions to Trump’s East Wing reconstruction project and are funding MAGA Inc., a super PAC formed to support the president. OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, for instance, donated $25 million to MAGA Inc. and are also among the biggest funders of Leading the Future, a newly formed pro-AI industry super PAC.

“Policy moves slowly, but the politics are accelerating with the technology,” said Ryan McConaghy, a partner at Forbes Tate Partners and once a senior adviser to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). “AI is going to be pulled into affordability. This is going from an affordability election to the double A—affordability and AI.” It offers populists on the left and right an opportunity to come together, he said.

Even though the current administration acted swiftly to embrace AI and fund a data center building boom through a $500 billion infrastructure project, the public is still largely split over whether AI’s benefits are worth the massive investment. Half of all Americans are “more concerned than excited” about the use of AI in their daily life, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey.

The midterms are expected to have a significant effect on the nature of AI lobbying in Washington, and across the country, especially if Democrats win state races and potentially put tighter environmental restrictions on new data center construction or pass AI safety laws. In Congress, the midterms are changing the approach for some K Street power brokers.

“In a midterm year, the incentive structure shifts,” said Joseph Hoefer, chief AI officer at Monument Advocacy. “There’s less appetite to move sweeping legislation that could hand the other side a perceived victory, and more emphasis on oversight, messaging and targeted action that plays well back home. That doesn’t mean AI falls off the agenda, but it does mean the conversation becomes more politically calibrated.”

Groups that stand to lose the most from widespread adoption are just as involved in the AI influence spending boom. The Recording Industry Association of America paid more than $1 million to lobbyists in 2025, rivaling big tech juggernauts such as NVIDIA. The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers also spent big, paying more to registered lobbyists than Apple Inc., Anthropic, and chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Bloomberg Government found.

“What we’ve been communicating to the White House and to Congress is that if we lower intellectual property protections, then what we’re basically doing is giving away American IP to the rest of the world,” said Mitch Glazier, chairman and CEO of the RIAA.

Glazier said the trade group works with both parties on copyright protection for its members. AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic have faced at least 41 lawsuits from musicians, artists, publishers, and others who claimed the companies trained their models on their copyrighted work.

Bang For Their Buck

That side’s lobbying efforts are beginning to produce results, according to Glazier: “It’s been a grand evolution within the administration from our point of view on our issues between last May and December.”

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers retained a lobbying firm, Radius Advocacy, in Washington in the final quarter of last year to promote its members’ interests as consumers and professionals increasingly turn to AI chatbots for medical advice and diagnosis. OpenAI and Anthropic both released health care products in January.

Given the fast-emerging policy debates around AI, “I came to realize that we needed to strengthen our presence in the US,” said Caroline Sutton, STM’s chief executive. The trade group represents academic publishers such as The Journal of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. Its US lobbying efforts are also part of STM’s expansion of its worldwide footprint, she said, “because of AI and where things are headed.”

One of the year’s largest jumps in AI spending, however, came from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which shelled out $1 million to outside lobbyists. That’s more than a 220% increase compared with 2024, Bloomberg Government found. The firm’s spending growth, and its co-founder Marc Andreessen’s role as a Trump adviser, has placed the business in the center of the administration’s AI strategy.

Read more: Andreessen Horowitz’s Rising Influence Over Trump-Era AI Policy

One benefactor of its spending push was BGR Group, a bipartisan shop with ties to the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill. It saw an explosive 107% jump in revenue tied to AI issues last year, thanks to Andreessen and other clients such as NVIDIA and Databricks Inc., an AI-based data analytics business.

Dan Greenwood, who heads BGR’s defense practice and served in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs during Trump’s first term, said he expects the sector to continue its snowball.

K Street firms have pulled in almost $420 million for AI-related lobbying since 2019, the year Trump ushered in new federal spending on AI research and development via executive order. But that amount represents just a fraction of the money companies and trade associations have spent to sway Washington’s views on the technology’s merits and pitfalls.

Ian Kalin, CEO of the AI defense company TurbineOne, works with the firm Forbes Tate Partners on AI messaging strategy. While Forbes Tate was among the top 20 lobbyists in terms of AI-related revenue in 2025, it isn’t registered to lobby for TurbineOne — meaning those fees aren’t disclosed. The vast amounts of money that flows into the AI influence game are impossible to quantify, as it involves a growing number of specialized advisory firms, in-house government affairs teams, PR companies, and the usual suspects on K Street.

“There are a lot of jokes made about the K Street folks,” Kalin admits. But, he said, with the fast-evolving technology and policymakers who are straining to keep up, his company felt it needed “expert guides” to navigate Washington.

“They can be worth the investment,” he said. Just as much of the public still doesn’t know the difference between OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google Gemini, “there’s a version of that” in government, too.

Methodology

Bloomberg Government collected and analyzed lobbying disclosure data on issues related to artificial intelligence from Lobbying Disclosure Act reports from 2019 through 2025.

Figures shown in the interactives represent the sum of income lobbying firms received from clients for AI-related lobbying services.

Amounts reported on filings that feature multiple disclosed lobbying issues may not be fully attributable to lobbying work related solely to AI. Registrants are not required to itemize income received in service of specific lobbying issues. Self-filed lobbying disclosures related to AI were not included in this interactive.

Keywords used to identify firms included: A.I., AI, artificial intelligence, AIOPS, ASIC, augmented reality, autonomous delivery, autonomous driving, autonomous car, autonomous cars, autonomous vehicle, autonomous vehicles, big data, chatbot, computer vision, deeptech, deep learning, GPU, GPUs, internet of things, IOT, large language model, large language models, LLM, LLMs, machine learning, NLP, robotics, robotic process automation, RPA, self-driving, smart glasses, xaas.

Spending totals for Google represent the combined spending of Google Client Services LLC, Google LLC, and Google Cloud. Spending totals for Oracle represent the combined spending of Oracle Corp. and Oracle America Inc. Spending totals for OpenAI represent the combined spending of OpenAI LLC and OpenAI OpCo LLC. Spending totals for SoftBank Group represent the combined spending of SoftBank Group Corp. and SB Group US Inc.