Somewhere in the hills of Appalachia, two families spent the better part of three decades shooting at each other, and by the end, almost nobody could tell you how it started. A stolen pig, the story goes. Maybe a girl who married the wrong cousin. The feud outlived the reason. That is the defining feature of a true blood feud. At some point, the fighting stops being about anything, and the fighting becomes the point.
I kept thinking about the Hatfields and McCoys, reading Theodore Schleifer’s reporting in the New York Times this week. Two super PACs have already torched something like $24 million, with more than $100 million more loaded in the chamber, to brawl over the 2026 midterms. And the punchline, the part you cannot make up, is that they are both AI-industry money. Both groups exist to shape a political climate friendly to artificial intelligence. And they appear to despise each other far more than they despise anything the other side actually stands for.
Let me set the table.
On one side, you have Public First, the super PAC aligned with Anthropic and run by Brad Carson, a former two-term Democratic congressman from Oklahoma. On the other, you have Leading the Future, aligned with OpenAI, counting OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman among its donors and strategist Josh Vlasto among the people running it. Same industry. Same small pool of Silicon Valley checkbooks. Same fundamental interest in who writes the rules for the most consequential technology of our lifetimes.
Now, I am not going to insult you by pretending these two groups want identical things. They do not. Public First and its backers generally favor stricter regulation of AI, including at the state level, where a lot of the real action is. Leading the Future and its donors lean accelerationist, closer to the Trump administration’s hands-off posture, pushing for industry-friendly laws that get out of the way. That is a real disagreement. Guardrails versus the open throttle is arguably the most important policy argument in tech right now, and reasonable, serious people land on opposite sides of it.
So here is what makes this whole thing so absurd. That worthy debate is not what is happening. What is happening is a vendetta.
Carson describes his group and its rival as “matter and antimatter.” He has said Public First’s entire reason for existing is to thwart Leading the Future, and he has boasted privately that he will contest every competitive race where the other side spends a dollar. Read that again. A super PAC at scale whose stated purpose is not to advance a policy but to cancel out another super PAC. Leading the Future, for its part, returns the affection by running ads about “doomers” and dark money and tying Public First’s favored candidates to the ghost of Sam Bankman-Fried. The two sides cannot agree to support the same candidate even when they both like the candidate.
You want to see what that does in the wild? Look at North Carolina. When Carson learned that Leading the Future wanted to help Representative Valerie Foushee, an embattled Democrat who needed the money, he sent word: Don’t you dare. If they got in, he was out. Leading the Future backed off and shelved an ad it had already produced. Public First spent $1.6 million, Foushee squeaked through, and Carson’s group took a victory lap. A candidate who could have had support from both wound up the prize in a turf war instead.
Or look at Alex Bores, running in a crowded Manhattan House primary, who has the misfortune of standing exactly in the crossfire. A group tied to Leading the Future has spent roughly $4 million against him. A group tied to Public First has spent $3.7 million for him. Nearly eight million dollars of AI-industry money is colliding over a single House seat, and a meaningful chunk of it is not really about Bores at all. It is about the other guys.
Step back, and the picture gets uncomfortable. AI policy in this country is increasingly being set not in committee rooms or through anything resembling public deliberation, but by dueling billionaire war chests fighting a proxy war on behalf of two companies that used to share a building. Anthropic was founded by people who walked out of OpenAI. Dario Amodei and Sam Altman take shots at each other for sport. The corporate rivalry has now metastasized into a political one, and the rest of us are living downstream of it.
And the people who actually build and run this stuff every day have almost no say in any of it. The engineers shipping models. The ops teams keeping the pipelines alive at three in the morning. The security folks trying to figure out what agentic AI does to their threat surface. The policy that governs all of our work is being hashed out over our heads by people whose primary motivation, on the evidence, is beating the other PAC.
It gets worse for the candidates. According to the reporting, Democrats and their strategists are now trying to say nothing at all about AI, dodging the super PACs, slow-walking questionnaires, working back channels, terrified of getting caught between the two clans. The House Democratic campaign arm has reportedly nudged candidates away from filling out Public First’s questionnaire entirely. When the safest move for a politician is to have no public position on the defining technology of the decade, the system is not producing better policy. It is producing silence.
The progressive Nida Allam, who narrowly lost to Foushee, put it about as plainly as anyone. She sees little difference between the two groups. One or the other, she said, it is both the same.
She is right and she is wrong at the same time, and that is the whole tragedy of it. On substance, the two sides are not the same, and the argument they could be having matters, actually. But on conduct, on the thing they have chosen to become, she nailed it. Two clans, same hollow, same money, firing across the ridge until everyone forgets what the original argument was even about.
The Hatfields and McCoys eventually ran out of reasons and kept shooting anyway. These two have plenty of reasons and shoot anyway. And the rest of us, the ones who actually have to live with these tools, are left standing in the valley holding the policy.
