So, AGI politics is heating up. Major AI companies are pouring money into Washington. A sentiment I've heard from the I'm-skeptical-of-all-this-tech-lobbying crowd is resignation: "Why raise money to oppose the tech companies? If you raise $1m, they'll raise you $10m more, and you'll never win."
Here's why I think this is wrong: there are sharply diminishing returns to lobbying spend. Once you have saturated those returns, whatever issue is most actually popular will win. Therefore, the first lobbying dollar matters a lot, particularly when there are big-spending corporate interests on one side and the American public on the other. And you might end up winning.
Consider two worlds with AI:
A) The AI companies would hypothetically be willing to spend $5bn on lobbying, but you can spend $500m
B) The current situation where they can spend $500m, and you spend ~$0-50m
Why the diminishing returns? There aren’t that many high-leverage channels to spend on. The pathways to influence in DC look opaque from the outside—funding think tanks, building coalitions, hiring seasoned lobbyists, supporting Super PACs, running persuasion or turnout programs—but each path bottlenecks on scarce political talent, constraints like TV and CTV ad inventory, and the finite number of competitive races in any cycle. Local broadcast inventory, in particular, hits capacity in peak windows, which blunts additional spend.
It’s unsurprising, therefore, that reporting put Elon Musk’s America PAC around $200m in 2024 and subsequent filings showed his total giving across committees exceeded $250m; to reach the next level of influence, he pursued platform ownership by acquiring X (formerly Twitter) in 2022. Or that Meta’s total declared federal lobbying spend in 2024 was $24.43m, about the price of hiring one of their new superintelligence researchers.
The Voting (Coin) Base
Lobbying is effective because it creates a force that matters to re-election-minded politicians. A clean example is Fairshake, the crypto Super PAC. With roughly two hundred million dollars in the 2024 cycle and more than a quarter-billion raised, it signaled credible punishment or protection in primaries and generals via targeted attack ads and transfers. You don’t need to do this many times before the lesson sinks in.
But if the vast majority of Americans opposed crypto, instead of it being broadly low-salience, and there had been some money at all at the anti-crypto lobby, rather than ~$0, the policy may have won out in favor of what the majority of Americans believe.
Perhaps as things should be.