(Zero Hedge)—The battle over artificial intelligence policy is moving from Washington hearing rooms to the campaign trail, where two rival political efforts are preparing to spend at least $150 million to shape the outcome of federal and state elections.
The clash pits industry-backed advocates for rapid AI development against a bipartisan group of former lawmakers calling for stronger regulation and tighter export controls. The scale of the planned spending exceeds the roughly $100 million deployed by crypto-aligned political groups during the 2024 election cycle, Punchbowl News reports.
Unlike the crypto push, however, the emerging AI fight features two organized camps preparing to go head-to-head: pro-industry “AI boomers” and regulation-minded “AI doomers,” each seeking to influence lawmakers and voters ahead of the 2026 midterms.
BOOMERS: AI To The Moon Under One National Framework
On the pro-AI side is Leading the Future, a group of industry-backed super PACs seeded with money from technology leaders and venture capital interests. The effort has received early backing from OpenAI President Greg Brockman, venture capital firm a16z, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and is preparing to spend up to $100 million.
Josh Vlasto, who is co-leading the group’s political strategy, said the goal is to elect candidates supportive of a national, federal-led approach to AI regulation.
“You will see a broad consensus in Congress to have the federal government lead on creating a national, pro-AI, pro-America regulatory framework,” Vlasto said.
That approach reflects industry concerns that a patchwork of state-level AI laws could hinder U.S. competitiveness, particularly in the race with China. While Vlasto said his group supports the idea of a federal AI standard, he indicated that policy specifics would be handled by a related advocacy organization.
Leading the Future is expected to support candidates who favor federal preemption of state AI regulations. Vlasto, who also served as a spokesperson for Fairshake – the crypto-aligned super PAC that backed more than 50 candidates in 2024 – declined to set a limit on how many races the AI-focused group might enter.
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The group has already signaled its willingness to play offense, announcing plans to spend against New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores, a Democrat who has supported state-level AI regulation and is running for Congress.
Vlasto said the organization is designed to move quickly as policy debates evolve and has leaned heavily into digital advertising, though it has also purchased television spots.
“This is a highly dynamic moment in this policy debate,” he said. “We are built… to use our resources and bring the AI sector together to advocate for this agenda.”
In short, AI Boomers want:
- Federal preemption of state AI laws: one national AI framework, not 50 state regimes. States like New York or California passing their own AI rules are seen as a threat to innovation.
- Light-touch federal regulation: Support a “federal standard,” but generally oppose detailed, prescriptive rules. Policy specifics are often deferred to industry-friendly agencies or advisory bodies.
- Speed over precaution: The belief is that slowing deployment risks losing the global AI race, especially to China. Safety, bias, and misuse concerns are viewed as manageable after deployment.
- Industry-driven governance: AI companies should have a major role in shaping the rules that govern them. Regulatory capture is not how they describe it; they frame it as “technical expertise.”
DOOMERS: Control AI before it reshapes society
On the opposing side, former Reps. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) and Brad Carson (D-Okla.) are launching two separate super PACs aimed at boosting candidates who favor stronger AI regulation and export controls.
Together, the PACs aim to raise $50 million for the 2026 cycle – roughly half the amount promised by Leading the Future, but enough, organizers say, to compete with tech industry spending.
“Most people are anxious about AI. They’re not opposed to it, they’re anxious,” Carson said, arguing that public concern about the pace of AI development is being underestimated.
Carson criticized what he described as tech companies’ “accelerationist YOLO agenda” and said his PACs would disclose their donors in the coming months.
The groups plan to support candidates for the House and Senate and are also considering investments in state legislative races and gubernatorial contests. Carson said spending decisions will be made across television, digital platforms, and other media as appropriate, with endorsements coming from both political parties.
Two policy issues are central to the effort: AI regulation and export controls on advanced AI chips bound for China.
Carson said the PACs will support candidates “who favor strong export controls,” and he reiterated opposition to President Trump’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell advanced AI chips to China. Carson, who serves as president of Americans for Responsible Innovation, has argued that export restrictions are critical to national security.
The PACs will also back candidates who believe government has a role in regulating AI, including allowing states to act in the absence of a federal framework.
Doomer priorities:
- Meaningful regulation, not just federal symbolism: They want enforceable rules on: Model deployment. Safety testing, Transparency, Accountability for harm.
- State authority as a backstop – not a takeover: States should be allowed to regulate AI if Congress fails to act.
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This mirrors how states regulate: Consumer protection, Data privacy, Product safety, State involvement is seen as a pressure mechanism, not the ideal endpoint.
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- Export controls and national security: They strongly support restricting advanced AI chips to China. They view unfettered exports as a strategic and military risk.
- Public trust as a strategic asset: Their argument is that if voters lose confidence in AI, politicians will overcorrect. Early guardrails are framed as pro-innovation, not anti-innovation.
Competing visions for AI’s future
While Carson and Stewart reject the label “anti-AI,” they argue that guardrails are necessary to maintain public trust in the technology.
“Big tech has lost the confidence of the American people,” Carson said. “And if the American people don’t believe in [AI], you’re going to see politicians turn against it in a very severe way.”
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.