AI safety<\/a> and tighter regulation.<\/p>\nBut OpenAI is also actively pushing the industry’s top legislative priority of preventing US states from passing their own laws governing AI, an effort that has twice failed in Congress but remains very much alive, backed by a sympathetic White House. <\/p>\n
The influence campaign has moved into electoral politics, with a pro-AI campaign called Leading the Future assembling a $100 million war chest to back AI friendly candidates in the 2026 midterms. <\/p>\n
President Donald Trump, a fierce opponent of AI regulation, counts OpenAI’s cofounder Sam Altman and its president Greg Brockman among his biggest donors. <\/p>\n
European regulators are also feeling the heat, with the French start-up Mistral recently presenting in Brussels a 22-point plan to accelerate AI development on the Continent.<\/p>\n
Lobbying outlays by the tech industry have surged 55% since 2021 to reach 151 million euros ($177 million) last year, according to study by the Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl, a nonprofit.<\/p>\n
‘Concentration of wealth’
For Margarida Silva of the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO, a Dutch nonprofit), AI firms are working from playbook of the oil and smoking industries, but with one major difference. <\/p>\n
“They’re just the wealthiest companies in the world, so they have a lot of money that they can use to put towards lobbying,” Silva said.<\/p>\n
“When you have such intense corporate lobbying that is based on having such a concentration of wealth, and that is standing in the way of public interest regulations… we are really talking about a democratic threat,” she added.<\/p>\n
Many executives also cultivate friendships with elected officials to have “privileged channels” with public administrations, said Charles Thibout, a politic science professor at the Sciences Po Strasbourg university in eastern France.<\/p>\n
He noted the phalanx of tech moguls at Trump’s inauguration last year, and the close ties between Mistral’s cofounder Arthur Mensch and French President Emmanuel Macron. <\/p>\n
Political leaders are often keen to be seen with AI’s top names, Thibout added, if only to help get some of their huge development spending for their states or regions.<\/p>\n
But “lawmakers are not fooled”, said Iteanu, as enthusiasm for AI has not dispelled public wariness about its potential consequences. <\/p>\n
Despite the colossal spending in the United States, for example, opinion polls regularly show that Americans remain highly sceptical about the technology’s benefits, and more worried that it spells doom for millions of jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI developers are ramping up efforts to win over the hearts and minds of officials in Europe and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16323,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,11927,11923,4989,25,4060,11926,157,11924,11925],"class_list":{"0":"post-16322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-job-impact","10":"tag-ai-lobbying","11":"tag-ai-safety","12":"tag-artificial-intelligence","13":"tag-artificial-intelligence-regulation","14":"tag-mistral-france","15":"tag-openai","16":"tag-tech-industry-lobbying","17":"tag-us-congress-ai-laws"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}