Jay Obernolte is the most powerful voice on artificial intelligence in the House of Representatives.

He chairs the Science Committee's Subcommittee on Research and Technology. He chaired the House's bipartisan AI Task Force. He sits on Energy and Commerce, including its Communications and Technology subcommittee. In April 2026 his colleagues elected him chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, a leadership job. He is, by his own office's description, "the only serving member of Congress with a graduate-level degree in AI."

He is also the author of the bill that would decide how — and whether — America regulates the most powerful AI systems ever built.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture capital fund launched a nonprofit that sells AI startups access to people exactly like him. Obernolte helped launch it.

What the AI Coalition Sells

The group is called the AI Coalition. HumanX, which runs a large AI industry conference, and the venture fund Humanrace Capital tapped Obernolte to launch it, Axios reported.

Here is how the coalition describes itself, in its own words:

"the first nonprofit specifically designed to provide early-stage AI companies, from pre-seed through Series B, with meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations that will define the next decade of innovation"

Read that phrase again — not "a voice," not "education." Meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations.

It is registered as both a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(6), so it can do education and lobbying. Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. The plan includes Washington fly-ins, collective advocacy, and business development events, according to an AI policy newsletter's account of the launch.

That's up to $42,000 a year, from a pre-seed startup, for access.

Obernolte's stated reason is sympathetic on its face: at AI hearings on Capitol Hill, he said, the voices of smaller companies and entrepreneurs were missing. That's a real problem. Big AI firms have armies of lobbyists and small ones don't.

But look at what the fix actually is. The problem is that access to Congress is bought. The solution on offer is a cheaper subscription to the same thing — sold with the endorsement of the congressman writing the rules.

If access to your own government has a monthly price, the answer isn't a discount tier. It's that access shouldn't have a price.

The Regulations He's Selling Influence Over

This isn't abstract. Nine months after the coalition launched, Obernolte introduced the bill.

On July 23, 2026, he and Rep. Lori Trahan introduced the FRONTIER Act (H.R. 9925) — the first serious attempt at a federal framework for frontier AI. It requires the biggest developers to publish risk frameworks, hire outside auditors, and report safety incidents to the Commerce Department.

Then there's Section 9. In the bill's own text:

"no State or political subdivision of a State may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers with respect to any Covered Subject Area."

The "Covered Subject Areas" are frontier AI risk transparency, third-party auditing and independent verification, and incident reporting. Those are precisely the three things states have started regulating.

There is no sunset date in Section 9. As written, that preemption is permanent.

It Would Override His Own State

Obernolte represents California's 23rd District. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law.

Governor Newsom signed SB 53 on September 29, 2025. It requires frontier developers to publish a safety framework, sets up a channel for companies and the public to report critical safety incidents to the state's Office of Emergency Services, and protects whistleblowers who disclose significant health and safety risks — enforceable by California's attorney general.

Transparency. Incident reporting. Those are two of the three Covered Subject Areas his bill takes away from states.

So the congressman from California wrote a bill that would strip California of the AI safety law it just passed — and helped launch a group that charges AI companies a monthly fee for "influence over the regulations."

Who Already Funds Him

Obernolte doesn't need the coalition to hear from AI money. It's already in his campaign account.

Near the top of his contributor list sits Anthropic PBC, the AI company, at $43,075 — alongside the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Google, SpaceX, Comcast, AT&T, and Charter are on the list too, companies regulated by the committees he sits on.

Only 4% of his money comes from small grassroots donors. Sixty-nine percent comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors, and he ranks #361 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

He is not a congressman who has to go looking for the tech industry's opinion. It arrives.

The Rest of Us Don't Get a Subscription

Here's what the $3,500-a-month tier buys that Obernolte's actual constituents don't get.

In February 2025, more than 200 people packed the Yucca Valley Community Center to ask him about DOGE firing staff at Joshua Tree National Park. He defended the cuts, said of Elon Musk that "I'm very glad there is someone looking at all of the waste," and the room booed him mid-sentence. His office's response afterward was to tell the paper that many in the crowd "were from outside the district and attended with the intent to disrupt rather than engage in a productive conversation," and to call the event an "anomaly."

That's the difference. A pre-seed AI startup in another state pays a monthly fee and gets a fly-in. A grandmother in Twentynine Palms gets a night in a community center and a press statement calling her an outside agitator.

We've seen what the AI industry's money buys when it's spent directly: in Florida, the AI and crypto industries spent $2.1 million electing Carlos De La Cruz — more than twice what his own campaign raised. And we've seen what preemption does downstream: in Pennsylvania, all ten Republicans in Congress voted for a ten-year ban on states writing AI rules while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs of the data centers.

Obernolte is further upstream than any of them. He's the one drafting the language.

What We Deserve

None of this requires believing Obernolte is corrupt in a criminal sense. There's no allegation that he broke a law.

The problem is the arrangement itself, and it's simple enough to state in one sentence: the member of Congress writing the country's AI rules lent his name to a business that sells companies influence over those rules, by the month.

He is also, by his own office's description, "a video game developer and business owner" — still in the industry he regulates.

When a lawmaker's name becomes part of a product other people sell, the public is entitled to ask who he works for. AI is going to reshape jobs, elections, schools, and safety in the High Desert the same as everywhere else. The people who live there are not pre-seed through Series B. They can't buy a tier.

They just get to vote.

Sources

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society summarizing Axios, "AI startups find a D.C. advocate in Rep. Obernolte" (October 2025), and the text of the FRONTIER Act, H.R. 9925 (introduced July 23, 2026).