South Dakota's Senate race isn't close. Mike Rounds is ahead of independent Brian Bengs, and the Democrat in the race dropped out last month.

So why is the artificial intelligence industry pouring money into it?

Wired reported on September 18 that "major super PACs associated with AI labs and investors have poured close to $1 million" into Rounds's race. The answer is in the job he holds: Rounds is one of the people writing the rules for AI in the Senate, and, as Wired put it, "Rounds has been viewed by AI executives as a top supporter of the industry."

Where the money came from

Here is the breakdown Wired found:

• About $600,000 in outside spending backing Rounds this cycle, most of it from the super PAC Defend American Jobs, which gets money from a super PAC financed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
• Roughly $215,000 directly from employees and PACs tied to AI labs, most notably Anthropic, and to other tech companies including Google and Microsoft.
• A new $2 million commitment from Leading the Future — a super PAC funded in part by OpenAI president Greg Brockman — toward Senate Republicans who have been supportive of the AI or crypto industry, Rounds among them.

His own donor records show the same thing. Rounds has taken $70,100 from Anthropic — $68,600 from people who work there and $1,500 from its PAC — and $56,400 from people at Alphabet, Google's parent company, according to OpenSecrets.

Leading the Future has done this before in races nobody expects to be close. It pledged $850,000 to back Kevin Hern, in a race nobody thinks he can lose.

Why Rounds matters to the industry

Rounds isn't just any senator on this issue. He was one of four members of the Senate's bipartisan AI working group, alongside Chuck Schumer, Todd Young and Martin Heinrich, which released the Senate's roadmap for AI policy after a year of "AI Insight Forums."

And AI regulation is about to be the big fight. Being seen as the industry's friend, Wired reported, "could prove crucial in the next Congress when AI regulation is expected to become a top priority."

The timing is hard to ignore. This week, a researcher who resigned from Anthropic — one of the companies whose employees have given Rounds tens of thousands of dollars — and an Anthropic research leader warned that AI systems could escape human control, Sludge reported. Congress then went home for the midterms without passing any rules, Common Dreams reported.

Big Tech in his own office

The AI money isn't only coming from outside. Rounds's longtime senior adviser and former chief of staff, Robert Skjonsberg, is a registered lobbyist for Meta before the South Dakota Legislature, Wired reported. We've reported on that arrangement before: Rounds's Senate office paid Skjonsberg more than $153,000 in a year while Meta and tobacco giant Altria were also his clients.

It's Skjonsberg — identified by SDPB as Rounds's Senate adviser — who answered when Bengs raised the money issue. Bengs said Rounds had "taken over $215,000 American dollars from AI data center interests, and is backed with hundreds of thousands more from super PACs that support big tech interests," South Dakota Public Broadcasting reported. "I am not accusing anyone of doing anything illegal," Bengs also said. "I am saying our system is corrupt, as a whole."

In his statement, as SDPB reported it, Skjonsberg called Bengs "a tool for the Democrat socialists trying to take over the country."

The pattern

Rounds is part of a wider pattern on this site. We've documented five Republicans who took the AI industry's money or bought its stock, and how the AI and crypto industries spent $2.1 million electing Carlos De La Cruz.

The price for ordinary people is already showing up. Across the country, data centers are driving up electric bills — we've tracked how utility money and data center deals landed on your bill.

What the record shows

Mike Rounds, one of four senators who wrote the Senate's AI roadmap, is in a race Wired calls noncompetitive — and AI-linked money has put about $815,000 into it: roughly $600,000 in outside spending, mostly from a super PAC funded through Andreessen Horowitz, and $215,000 directly from employees and PACs of AI labs like Anthropic and tech companies like Google and Microsoft, according to Wired. His longtime senior adviser is a registered state lobbyist for Meta. AI executives, Wired reported, see Rounds as "a top supporter of the industry."

Source

This post is based on Wired's reporting. Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images, via Wired.