America's leading AI companies spent record sums on lobbying in Washington in recent months to limit unfriendly regulation and shape US rules around data centres and vetting advanced models. OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22mn in the first half of 2026, while Anthropic nearly tripled spending to $3.53mn, according to federal disclosures. Google and Microsoft spent as much as in any quarter since 2020.

The increase comes as the industry confronts political battles on multiple fronts and builds a more permanent influence operation. "The lobbying offensive has been as much about deterring regulation as making the case for an affirmative government industrial policy," said Amba Kak, co-executive director of AI Now Institute. Top issues include federal rules governing new model releases, data centre construction and power, and whether developers make model parameters publicly available.

The industry "lost loudly" an effort to ban state-level AI regulation, but "very little else has moved in terms of regulation. Overall, it's been a good quarter for them," Kak said. The Trump administration favours a light-touch framework, but rapid advances and competition from China have forced interventions on model releases. Companies diverge on model safeguards, open-source systems, and federal regulation's role. Scale AI and Tencent also increased lobbying expenditure.