OpenAI Workers Fund Rival Super PAC Against Brockman
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- Guardrails Alliance has received more than $215,000 from seven current and one former OpenAI employee since launching last month with $5 million in initial funding, with a broader goal of raising $15 million this election cycle to counter the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future.
- Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, an OpenAI research engineer since 2022 who worked on societal-harms mitigation, gave the largest individual donation of $200,000, telling WIRED his four years of research 'will have gone to waste' without regulatory guardrails holding private companies accountable.
- Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and cofounder, and his wife Anna committed $50 million to rival super PAC Leading the Future, which launched last summer with over $100 million from tech industry leaders and first targeted the congressional campaign of Alex Bores, author of New York's landmark AI safety law.
- OpenAI leadership has tried to distance the company from Leading the Future via a June blog post calling Brockman's PAC engagement 'personal,' yet rank-and-file workers — including safety researcher Gabriel Wu ($5,000) and AI alignment researchers Julie Steele and Jason Wolfe ($5,000 each) — are now funding the counter-PAC directly.
- Former OpenAI research manager David Farhi, who left last summer after seven years, donated $3,000 and told WIRED it is 'disappointing' that Leading the Future 'actively works against OpenAI's mission' by aiming to shut down AI regulation discussions.
- Guardrails Alliance and Anthropic-backed Public First Action (which has committed $20 million) both supported Bores in his primary loss; the group is now eyeing 2026 races including California's 34th congressional district, with former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O'Farrell also listed as a donor.
Why it matters: The financial mismatch is lopsided — roughly $215,000 from rank-and-file researchers versus $50 million from Brockman and his wife alone — but the symbolic weight is that the very OpenAI staffers who work on AI safety are now personally underwriting the regulatory counteroffensive against a PAC their own president created, exposing an open fault line inside the company over how aggressively to fight for or against AI rules.
