OpenAI employees donate over $215,000 to group

What happened

More than a dozen rank-and-file workers at OpenAI have quietly put over $215,000 into Guardrails Alliance, a political spending group set up to counter Leading the Future—the pro-industry super PAC bankrolled with more than $100 million from tech leaders, including OpenAI's own president and co-founder Greg Brockman. The donations, first reported by Wired, are small change next to the war chest they're up against.

Guardrails Alliance launched last month with $5 million and is aiming for $15 million this cycle—a figure co-founder Shaunna Thomas frames as enough to follow Leading the Future into more races rather than match it dollar for dollar. Her bet is on public opinion doing the heavy lifting: expose what the AI PACs are funding, she argues, and voters recoil on their own. The group isn't alone in the fight.

Public First Action, a super PAC backed with $20 million from Anthropic, is running its own campaign for AI safeguards in 2026. Both groups backed Alex Bores—author of New York's landmark AI safety law—in his primary for the state's 12th congressional district, a race flooded with $27 million from both sides before Bores lost. OpenAI has tried to put space between itself and Brockman's giving.

Guardrails Alliance is expected to name more donors in its filing, including former Andreessen Horowitz partner John O'Farrell, who has publicly accused his old colleagues of using the PAC to intimidate politicians over AI governance. Without commonsense guardrails, AI will accelerate economic inequality, displace millions of workers without safety nets [1], drain local communities' water and power for data centers they never asked for [

Why it matters

But they signal something louder than their dollar value: a section of the people building frontier AI now want binding rules on it, and they're willing to spend their own salaries to say so. The split runs right through OpenAI's headquarters. Brockman and his wife Anna have committed $50 million to Leading the Future, which launched last summer to oppose what it calls policies that stifle innovation.

Seven current OpenAI employees and one former staffer have donated to the opposing camp, according to Guardrails Alliance, which shared some names with Wired ahead of its first FEC filing. The result is a company whose president funds one side of the AI regulation fight while his colleagues bankroll the other.

The single biggest OpenAI donation came from Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, a research engineer at the company since 2022, who gave $200,000. He told Wired he spent his four years there working on reducing the societal harms AI could cause, and worried that research would count for nothing if it never turned into enforceable guardrails. Others gave far less but made the same point.

Safety researcher Gabriel Wu put in $5,000, saying he wanted to push back against the money being spent to keep AI unregulated. Alignment researchers Julie Steele and Jason Wolfe each gave $5,000, and former research manager David Farhi, who left last year after seven years, added $3,000.

What to watch

Pressed by Wired, a spokesperson pointed to a June blog post stating that Brockman's involvement with Leading the Future was personal, not on the company's behalf, and that employees are free to take part in politics in their own capacity. Global affairs chief Chris Lehane has said he helped set up Leading the Future and consults Brockman on his political giving, though he isn't involved in daily operations.

Leading the Future, for its part, rejects the charge that it wants to shut down debate—spokesperson Jesse Hunt said the PAC has itself advocated for federal AI rules and is proud of the range of candidates it backs.