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- Hacker News
- And this is after crypto bros spent record sums on lobbying 5 years ago.by mrloopex
- Welcome to our political system.
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.
- This is axiomatic -- organizations are going to spend some proportion of the money they have to bribe politicians in their favor, modulo the RoI which will vary a bit case to case. Therefor the more money the organization has the more they're going to be bribing. AI companies at present have tons of money. Taken to the limit you get AIPAC.by dboreham
- Curious whether anyone's tracked how this compares to lobbying spend from earlier tech waves at a similar stage — e.g. crypto/fintech circa 2018-2019, or telecom in the 90s. Is $2-3M actually low for an industry this size, or is AI lobbying still ramping toward where crypto ended up?by manvshin
- You would think if the general public actually wanted this, lobbying wouldn't be necessary. Call your reps. Let them know how you feel about intellectual property theft, wage theft, ecological impacts, and the intentional erosion of the voting power of the majority in modern democracy.by zombittack
- Yes, call your reps. See if anything changes since the last time you called them.by FLeXMurphy
- You don’t have credibility. someone in Washington who goes to lunches with senators does.
- Anthropic has been pretty transparent that their plan for dealing with Chinese open models is regulatory capture. All the fear-mongering and posturing that AI is so dangerous only they can be trusted with it. They want to legislate their competition away, at least in a few markets. OpenAI has been more subtle about it.
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.
by SwellJoe - Does not seem like a lot. US Chamber of Commerce spends 600M/year, Meta 160M, Bayer 73M, Toyota 64M. https://www.openlobby.us/clientsby wkandek
- Lots of pitchforks in these comments.
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.
by TheTaytay - Lobbying, as it is practised in the US, is hardly better than bribery. Talking to lawmakers about what is exclusively in your best interest, to the exclusion of everything else, is harmful. You wind up leveraging a group collective's understanding of dishonesty and dark speech patterns. No citizen has the eloquence or bull pulpit to oppose this.
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.
by jbm - Those companies aren't spending millions an year to "paying a professional to talk to lawmakers".by marcosdumay
- You're making this very dichotomous, but I'm not convinced. Why shouldn't there be a way to bring issues to the parliament's attention without private money? For example, while flawed, the EU's Citizens' Initiative approach seems to be doing some good work bringing attention to issues that are in the public interest. I'd encourage us to look more extensively into these sort of open initiatives.by falcor84
- > Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest
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.
by mithr - For technical minded US folks who read about this and are outraged and/or interested in how they can do more politically, I highly recommend checking out fellowship programs like TechCongress and Horizon which place technical experts in Congress for a year (disclosure, I'm an alum) and have become critical sources of expertise in a world dominated by nontechnical folks. TechCongress applications for next year closed, but I believe Horizon's are still open.
- I'm reading this thinking "hell yes, I should look into this!"
I'm not American. Lol
I should see if there are similar things for Canada
- I've always wondered: is this actually wanted? I ask because I live in a low population state where it's fairly easy to make contact with politicians' offices and there have been various cases over the years where I've noticed things occurring that seem off from a technical perspective, and have offered to help. Nobody ever seemed interested, which led me to believe their incentives lie somewhere other than "getting things right" or "learning the truth". (both parties, fwiw).by dboreham
- > OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22mn in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53mn, according to federal disclosures.
Never ceases to amaze me how cheap lobbying is. That's pocket change for these companies.
by simonw - Well you don't want to push the price up any more than you have to since then each subsequent lobby will cost a minimum of that amount.by butlike
- Alternatively, couldn't this be seen as evidence on favor of the "corporate narrative" on lobbying? Namely, that the purpose of lobbying is to ensure politicians have instant and easy access to high-quality, insider information relevant to their decision-making on corporate issues (as opposed to simply being bribed)?
I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).
by paytonjjones - These numbers are so small that I'm doubly ashamed of all the corruption happening. If politicians at least sold out for fuck-you money, I'd understand, but no.
- That's most definitely not the real sum.
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.
by shevy-java - Compared to the bailout they're going to get at some point, because they're vital to national security and whatever, I think you could easily be looking at a 1000x+ return on investment on those numbers.by jerf
- It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails?
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.
by rayiner - It's so cheap that normal people could band together and re-buy democracy. It's the banding together part that is hard.by 01284a7e
- Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
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.
by Aunche