Rivals

Mark Zuckerberg created a personal super PAC to kneecap his AI rivals

In late August, two pro-AI super PACs were announced on the same day, intent on shaping the upcoming midterm elections. One was a fairly traditional super PAC, announced via a splashy press release, with multiple major industry players planning to donate over $100 million to boost AI-friendly candidates across the country.

The other was far more unusual. Meta had quietly filed to create the Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California, a state-only super PAC that would allow Meta to spend its own money to run political ads on behalf of their AI interests — and only their interests.

After the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United loosened campaign finance restrictions, corporations and the super-wealthy have poured billions into super PACs: political action committees that can accept unlimited amounts of corporate money to spend on ads, advocacy, and voter turnout during elections. (The only requirement is that they cannot directly coordinate with candidates or campaigns, or directly donate to them.)

But while corporations and individual billionaires have donated to super PACs, campaign finance experts tell The Verge that to their knowledge, it is exceedingly rare for a company to create its own super PAC — especially a company controlled by one person.

Thanks to a unique corporate ownership structure that gives him complete control of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has essentially created his own personal California super PAC, allowing him to spend Meta’s money on politically protecting his priorities in the heart of the tech industry — and, possibly, against the interests of his corporate rivals. Meta confirmed that the company plans to spend tens of millions of dollars as part of the initial investment and said that it would figure out who had ultimate decision-making power over candidates to back, and whether Meta’s own social media products were used to promote those candidates, once the super PAC was up and running.

“It’s essentially a way for [Zuckerberg] to spend the company’s money on his political choices, whereas at a company like Google, there’s not a single person who’s a majority shareholder who can dictate what the company does,” Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor specializing in election law, told The Verge. “It’s interesting, because Zuckerberg could just spend his own personal money to do this. But instead, he’s doing it through the company.”

In a statement to The Verge, Meta’s VP of public policy, Brian Rice, said that Meta launched the super PAC in order to back “candidates regardless of party who recognize California’s vital role in AI development and embrace policies that will keep the state at the forefront of the global tech ecosystem.”

”As home to many of the world’s leading AI companies, California’s innovation economy has an outsized impact on America’s economic growth, job creation, and global competitiveness,” Rice said. “But Sacramento’s regulatory environment could stifle innovation, block AI progress, and put California’s technology leadership at risk.”

Certain aspects of the Meta super PAC are not unprecedented. In 2024, the crypto industry launched several super PACs to push anti-crypto elected officials out of office and replace them with allies. Nor is it unprecedented for an individual billionaire to fund a super PAC: in the same election Elon Musk spent over $235 million to boost Republican candidates via his own personal super PACs.

But Musk used his own personal funds for those super PACs, giving him the freedom to back his candidates without answering to shareholders. The crypto super PACs were coalitions, and all the participating companies would benefit as a whole industry.

Individual tech companies have entered the super PAC game occasionally. Earlier this year, Airbnb established one in New York City to influence the heated mayoral election. And Uber has several super PACs across the country, including California. But neither company was operating in a landscape so full of other potential competitors, and neither has remotely the same financial clout.

Leading the Future, the other AI super PAC, is running the crypto playbook. On launch day, LTF announced that it had already brought several AI heavy hitters on board — Andreessen Horowitz, Perplexity AI, Ron Conway, and Joe Lonsdale, to name a few — and planned to bring in more. They also planned to launch committees both on the state and federal level, leaving open the possibility that they could launch a California super PAC. (Leading the Future did not respond to a request asking if Meta had been invited to participate, or if they planned to file in California.)

But why, then, would Zuckerberg go it alone? “There’s nothing preventing this Meta super PAC from adding new partners,” Saurav Ghosh, the director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center, told The Verge. “But I think what they would give up in that situation is the control that you have when [the super PAC] is entirely funded by one company.”

In other words, Meta’s first priority is not to convince the public to come to their side, since holding Big Tech accountable is often a bipartisan issue — especially during a time when Meta is being lambasted over reports of suppressing research on child online safety. Instead it’s about convincing politicians to vote Meta’s way, and for that matter, Zuckerberg’s way.

That means Meta’s strategy could be the same as that of the crypto super PACs, with one twist. Though they often disagreed on whom to back, the crypto PACs ultimately had the shared goal of ousting politicians threatening to crack down on the industry. But Meta could run attack ads against candidates that don’t support their interests — even if they’re pro-AI, but in a way that favors Meta’s competition.

“The threat of a super PAC is not that, Oh, Big Tech is going to be running pro-Facebook messaging in my race and a voter might come to me and say, ‘Now, why aren’t you standing up for Facebook?’ No, the threat is that a big tech company is going to give hundreds of millions of dollars to help your opponent win,” Sacha Haworth, executive director of the nonprofit Tech Oversight Project, told The Verge.

It makes sense for Meta to focus its fire specifically on California. Although the AI industry and lawmakers fully agree that there should be a nationwide law regulating the use of artificial intelligence, it’s highly unlikely that Congress will pass any comprehensive AI regulatory bill anytime soon. Their last attempt to vote on a major AI-related bill — a 10-year moratorium on states writing their own AI laws — died in the Senate, 99 to 1, during the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill earlier this year.

California, meanwhile, has passed some of the strongest AI laws in the US and is now proposing what would be the most stringent standards in the country. SB 53, for instance, would compel AI companies to disclose and publicly adhere to their safety protocols; its critics claim that the regulations would stifle the industry’s growth and drive companies out of state.

In the absence of Congress, California’s proposed laws would effectively set the standards for the entire AI industry. The industry is largely based in California, and so are nearly 40 million residents those companies are competing to serve.

As such, the timing of Meta’s and LTF’s announcements was not lost on Sacramento’s lawmakers. Just as the California state legislature is wrapping up its yearly session — just before Gov. Gavin Newsom enters a 30-day decision period to sign or veto bills — they received an announcement that “there are two new AI super PACs focusing on California coming after them,” Haworth said. “It was designed for maximum intimidation.” The timing could be aimed at Newsom himself; there’s a governor’s race next year, after all, and the 2028 presidential election after that.

“Don’t forget, every politician, especially the governor of California — people have larger ambitions,” Haworth said. “What happens now will follow them. There are all kinds of implied threats here.”

Even before August, lobbying was ramping up in California. According to data from the state of California, Big Tech companies spent about $2.5 million on lobbying in the state during the first half of this year. For reference, in 2024, Google, Amazon, Waymo, Meta, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association were all among the top 100 lobbying expenditures in California. Those specific companies spent a combined $22.5 million for the whole year. Barring the fact we don’t have public third-quarter data available yet, there’s a good chance we’re likely to see tens of millions spent for the rest of 2025.

“They have oodles and oodles of lobbyists, and this is when they’re meeting with lawmakers multiple times a day — and all of this is happening at the same time members in California wake up in the morning and they see an announcement [about the super PAC],” Haworth said. “They’re trying to do at the ballot box what they can’t do legally. They’re going to try to buy off politicians.”

The fact that LTF and Meta are running two separate pressure campaigns, however, is telling.

“I just don’t think Meta was invited to the other AI party,” Haworth said, adding, “Look, you have Mark Zuckerberg trying to poach employees from every other AI company, from OpenAI especially, offering them packages in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and failing in a lot of cases.”

Dave Kasten, head of policy at Palisade Research, made a similar point — that at their core, people are people, and Zuckerberg may have ruffled too many feathers in his quest to poach top-tier research talent. “If I were listing hypotheses, that’s probably pretty high on my list of why this is happening,” he said.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg’s decision to fly solo, at least when it comes to protecting Meta’s own political interests, is not completely unprecedented. In 2022, during Big Tech’s fight against proposed bipartisan antitrust laws, Meta primarily funded its own tech industry advocacy group, the American Edge Project, to further its agenda. And more than 10 years ago, Zuckerberg spearheaded the launch of FWD.us, an immigration reform nonprofit, with tens of millions pooled from himself and others in the tech industry looking to champion white-collar tech talent.

“I think part of it might just be that, attitudinally, that’s how he rolls,” Kasten said, adding that Meta’s past posture on open-source AI may also set its strategy apart if it chooses to continue on that route — meaning Meta may want to advocate for things that uniquely benefit its own AI strategy.

And it might not stop there. Hasen, the UCLA election law professor, told The Verge that there was nothing preventing Zuckerberg from using the Meta super PAC on issues beyond supporting pro-AI candidates.

In California alone, Meta could weigh in on tech-related ballot initiatives, which allow citizens to pass laws with a majority vote without going through the legislative process. There is some precedent for industry influence: in 2020, Uber, DoorDash, Postmates, Instacart, and Lyft spent over $180 million to pass Proposition 22, which would let rideshare companies classify their drivers as “independent contractors” and not employees. However, Yes on 22 was a political alliance between several direct competitors donating to one campaign.

But Zuckerberg could also play a role in state elections with implications far beyond tech. In November, Californians will vote on whether to redraw California’s congressional map to add five more Democrat districts — a direct response to Texas Republicans redrawing their own map to gain a five-vote advantage in the House of Representatives. And next year, with Newsom ineligible to run for reelection due to term limits, Californians will have to vote for a new governor — a person that any tech corporation, Meta included, would love to directly influence.

“It doesn’t mean [Zuckerberg has] made the choice” to do that, Hasen added. “But since he controls the company, if [a super PAC] is something he didn’t want to do, I’m sure they wouldn’t be doing it.”

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