The Hook
In 2023, OpenAI filed $260,000 in federal lobbying disclosures. In 2025, it reported a record spend of $2.99 million. The arc — from a standing start to a record in two years — is the story of an entire industry discovering that the rules are being written and showing up to help write them.
The Question
When AI companies simultaneously build the most consequential technology of the era and run the fastest-growing lobbying operations in Washington, whose interests does the regulation reflect?
The Paper Trail
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings for 2025 show: Meta led all companies in any industry at $26.29 million. Nvidia: approximately $4.9 million, approximately seven times its 2024 spend. Anthropic: $3.13 million, a record. OpenAI: $2.99 million, a record, up from $1.76 million in 2024 and $260,000 in 2023. By one count, 25% of registered federal lobbyists worked the AI beat in 2025, up from approximately 11% in 2023.
The revolving door: the U.S. AI Safety Institute at NIST was renamed the Center for AI Standards and Innovation in June 2025. Its inaugural director, Elizabeth Kelly, departed following the January 2025 change of administration. A subsequent appointee with prior Anthropic affiliation, Collin Burns, was reported dismissed within days of appointment (reported by Fortune and corroborated independently by The Washington Post).
The Synthesis
The LDA filings are public, updated quarterly, and searchable by anyone. The scale and speed of the AI industry's lobbying buildup is documented in those filings without inference required. The question is not whether the spend is happening — it is. The question is what it buys. The answer to that is in the policy outcomes, which are still accumulating.