OpenAI president withdraws $25 million pledge to pro-AI super PAC

Guardrails Alliance formed to counter Leading the Future’s political spending

Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, has withdrawn a pledge to donate another $25 million to Leading the Future, a super PAC working to elect members of Congress who support favorable policies for the artificial intelligence industry, according to The Wall Street Journal. The withdrawal was earlier reported by the New York Times. A representative for Leading the Future declined to comment, and Brockman did not respond to a request for comment.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Brockman sent a Slack message to OpenAI employees in June acknowledging the distraction his initial donation had created and saying he and his wife had no plans to go through with the second donation.

Brockman and his wife donated $25 million to Leading the Future last September and had committed to contributing another $25 million in 2026. Brockman said at the time he made the donation in a personal capacity, but OpenAI employees criticized the move as an attempt by the company’s leadership to thwart sensible AI regulations.

In July, several OpenAI employees announced they were donating more than $200,000 to the Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC created specifically as a counterweight to Leading the Future.

The Guardrails Alliance said in a statement that it has been “leading the charge to prove Leading the Future is politically toxic and a liability” for public officials that receive the group’s support. “Now, thanks to internal and external pressure, Greg Brockman has backed out of his pledge to donate another $25 million to them,” the group said.

Leading the Future launched last year to support candidates for Congress who backed favorable regulation for the artificial intelligence industry and to push back against arguments that AI models must be regulated before they create catastrophic risks for society. In the year since the super PAC’s launch, artificial intelligence has become an increasingly polarizing topic and is expected to be a top issue in this year’s midterm elections.

The group launched with financial backing from Silicon Valley leaders including the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, the AI startup Perplexity, 8VC managing partner and Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and SV Angel founder Ron Conway. Brockman and his wife were listed among the group’s marquee backers.

Leading the Future has made independent expenditures to support and oppose Republicans and Democrats running for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate. Its highest-profile spending was in the Democratic primary for a congressional seat in Manhattan, which became a proxy fight over tech regulation.

An affiliate of Leading the Future spent more than $8 million against state assemblymember Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee who co-wrote one of the country’s strictest state AI laws, while groups that backed stricter regulation of AI companies spent millions more to support him. Bores finished second in the primary.

In June, OpenAI distanced itself from Brockman’s contributions to the super PAC, writing in a blog post that the couple made their contributions in a personal capacity and that the company did not direct the PAC’s activities or “have visibility into their operations.”

Brockman said in an interview in May that he did not agree with all the group’s spending decisions but declined to discuss specifics. He and Anna Brockman said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal last year that they supported “AI centrism” and were pushing for federal regulations to promote innovation, defend systems from misuse and protect “the privacy of conversations with AI.” Beyond that, they said, “most developers and open-source models, and almost all deployments of today’s technology, should have minimal additional regulatory burden.”

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.