Axios AI+ Government
January 23, 2026
1 big thing: How AI swallowed tech lobbying in 2025
AI didn't just increase its footprint in Washington in 2025: It ate tech lobbying whole.
Why it matters: AI's ubiquity, quick growth and key role in helping America compete globally have shifted how the biggest and richest tech companies get what they want from D.C.
The big picture: Long-running fights over social media content and privacy have been eclipsed by national security and infrastructure debates around AI.
- In Washington, conversations about how the most advanced frontier model companies like OpenAI and Anthropic should be regulated have been largely drowned out by the White House's desire to see them succeed.
- States, meanwhile, have taken the lead on AI safety policy.
What they're saying: "AI capabilities are significantly reshaping other policy issues, from health care to energy to defense, privacy and antitrust," said Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy, told Ashley.
- "The demand for education about AI has shot through the roof," Craig Albright, senior vice president for U.S. government relations at the Business Software Alliance, told Axios.
- AI is spreading to all topics, Albright noted: "People [on the Hill] want ideas ... for how AI relates to financial services, or making sure AI-based software for farming purposes is reliable."
New coalitions of players working on chips, compute, cloud and data center infrastructure have more influence than ever before, sometimes elbowing out Big Tech players as they seek permission to grow, build and scale across the country.
Industries that traditionally lobby D.C. have had to pivot to adapt to the age of AI.
- "Finance, health care, transportation, defense, education ... everyone suddenly has to take a position on AI, even if they never had a D.C. tech footprint," said Joseph Hoefer, principal and chief AI officer at public affairs firm Monument Advocacy.
AI companies are bringing on more outside lobbying firms and staffing up their policy shops in Washington as they extend into spaces like health care.
- Anthropic, which rolled out Claude for Healthcare earlier this month, hired three new firms since December of last year, including Avenue Solutions, which mostly counts health care clients, per federal lobbying disclosures.
- OpenAI, beyond its own in-house lobbying, has worked with D.C. heavyweights DLA Piper LLP and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.
That's a far cry from just a few years ago, when OpenAI's Sam Altman came to Washington supporting broad AI regulation, not trying to avoid it.
The numbers alone don't tell the whole story.
- While AI companies have steadily upped their spending from quarter to quarter, they still don't spend nearly as much on lobbying as Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, as the chart shows.
- But what their companies are doing is changing the tech policy debate for everyone in the space.
- Pro-AI super PACs, along with company donations to things like President Trump's ballroom, may go further than traditional lobbying dollars in Trump 2.0 world, where AI policy has largely been dictated from the White House down.
What we're watching: In past debates, keeping a united voice for the industry became impossible as different-sized companies with varying incentives and business models diverged from one another on policy priorities.
- AI will accelerate those divides while slowing down other tech policymaking: "AI has become so all-encompassing that it's effectively frozen actual progress on other tech issues," Hoefer said.
- "Congress has limited bandwidth, and AI became the bucket where everything gets dumped: workforce, national security, kids' online safety, data governance," he said. "The result is that you get a lot of motion, but not always a lot of resolution."
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Axios AI+ Government
