Corporate spending on the 2026 US midterm elections has already broken records, and the money is coming from a different set of industries than in past cycles. Companies in cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence and online sports betting — sectors that barely existed in US politics a decade ago — have become some of the largest single sources of corporate political money ahead of the November 3 vote, according to campaign finance filings and the watchdog group Public Citizen.
How much has been spent, and by whom
US companies spent $517 million on House and Senate races in the 15 months through the end of the first quarter of 2026, according to a report published by Public Citizen in June 2026. That already exceeds the $461 million corporations spent across the full two-year 2024 election cycle, and it does not include the final stretch of campaign spending expected before polling day.
Of that $517 million, Public Citizen found that corporations in crypto, Big Tech, AI and online betting accounted for $294 million — 57 percent of all corporate spending in the cycle so far. Those figures cover disclosed corporate political spending only; they do not include money moving through dark-money nonprofits, which are not required to name their donors.
Company money, personal money and PAC money are not the same thing
Most of this spending is not a company writing a cheque to a candidate directly — that is illegal for corporations under US law. Instead, companies and wealthy individuals give to super PACs, political committees that can raise and spend unlimited sums so long as they do not coordinate directly with a candidate's own campaign. Some of these industries also route money through affiliate PACs that draw funding from a parent super PAC, and through dark-money nonprofits that can spend on politics without disclosing their donors at all.
This means "crypto spending" or "AI spending" figures often blend three different things: corporate donations, personal donations by a company's executives or founders, and money a super PAC itself decides to spend. Reuters reported in August 2026, citing federal and state filings, that SpaceX founder Elon Musk had personally put more than $90 million toward 2026 federal races, while Google co-founder Sergey Brin separately spent over $106 million of his own money fighting a proposed California wealth tax. Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, donated $65 million from its corporate treasury to four separate super PACs backing candidates from both parties in state races in California, Texas and Illinois, Reuters reported. None of these three examples is a "crypto" or "AI" donation — they illustrate how much of the money often labelled that way is really personal or company spending sitting alongside, not inside, the PAC totals below.
Crypto wrote the playbook in 2024
The model other industries are now copying was built by the cryptocurrency sector during the 2024 election cycle. Coinbase, Ripple and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz funded a super PAC called Fairshake, which spent heavily to help defeat Ohio's Sherrod Brown, then the Senate Banking Committee chair and one of Congress's most vocal crypto critics.
In a November 2024 report on that campaign, titled "Big Crypto, Big Spending," Public Citizen described Fairshake's approach directly: "It is akin to a corporate Death Star hovering over elections, poised to annihilate individual candidates in order to instill a discipline — acquiescence to corporate demands — among all candidates." Both phrases are Public Citizen's own wording from that report, though only "annihilate individual candidates" has since been widely quoted; "Death Star" has instead been repeated so often by other outlets that it now functions as informal shorthand for the PAC's strategy.
Fairshake's approach was unusual for a corporate PAC: rather than backing one party, it supported crypto-friendly candidates of either party and spent against critics regardless of affiliation. Heading into the 2026 midterms, the Fairshake network — which includes the Democratic-facing Protect Progress and Republican-facing Defend American Jobs — had received close to $137 million and had roughly $127 million on hand as of its most recent Federal Election Commission filing in July 2026, according to a review of that filing by the fact-checking outlet FactCheck.org. A separate FEC disclosure filed in March 2026 put Fairshake's own committee receipts, not counting its two affiliates, at just under $133 million.
AI and sports betting are following the same model
The AI industry has built a similar operation. Leading the Future, a super PAC network launched in August 2025 by Andreessen Horowitz together with OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and venture investor Ron Conway, started with more than $100 million in initial commitments, SiliconANGLE reported when the group launched. FEC records show the group's flagship committee had raised just over $50 million by mid-March 2026, a figure Public Citizen separately identified as the largest single beneficiary of Big Tech and AI corporate political spending this cycle.
Individual AI companies have also moved money through less visible channels. Reuters reported in August 2026 that Anthropic had donated at least $40 million this cycle through a dark-money nonprofit called Public First Action, which does not disclose its other donors, and separately backs a super PAC called Public First that has raised $3.9 million, including $1 million from Anthropic co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei. Anthropic has said the nonprofit's spending is meant to educate the public on policy rather than back specific candidates.
Online sports betting has become the third-largest corporate donor sector this cycle, behind only crypto and technology, Public Citizen estimates. DraftKings, FanDuel, bet365 and Fanatics funnelled about $72 million into a super PAC called Win for America between November 2025 and the end of June 2026, according to FEC records reported by NBC News. DraftKings was the largest single contributor at roughly $34 million, followed by FanDuel at $27 million, with bet365 and Fanatics each giving $5.5 million. Win for America has directed that money into two affiliate PACs targeting state legislative races, including more than $12 million spent in Georgia alone while state lawmakers debated sports betting legislation.
What it means for the November vote
The industry-specific spending sits inside a far larger political advertising market. The ad-tracking firm AdImpact projected in June 2026 that total political ad spending for the 2025-2026 cycle would reach $11.6 billion, which would make it the most expensive election cycle on record, surpassing the $11.2 billion spent during the 2023-2024 presidential cycle and the $8.9 billion spent in the 2022 midterms. That figure is a forecast covering all political spending, not corporate money alone, and AdImpact has revised it upward twice already as the cycle has progressed. With the election still weeks away, the final total will not be confirmed until after polling day.
Public Citizen's research director, Rick Claypool, has argued that this kind of concentrated industry spending risks crowding out issues most voters say they care about in favour of narrow regulatory fights. Crypto, AI and sports betting executives have not publicly disputed the scale of the spending; their argument, made through the PACs themselves, is that it gives newer industries a political voice that older, more established sectors have had for decades.
