AI PACs spend nearly $1M in support of Mike Rounds’ Senate race

South Dakota is about as competitive a Senate battleground as a pickup basketball game against a toddler. The state has reliably sent Republicans to the upper chamber for decades, and incumbent Sen. Mike Rounds faces no serious threat to his seat. Yet AI-linked political action committees have already spent more on his race than the state’s own residents have contributed.

The spending is part of a broader, well-funded operation by Leading the Future, a super PAC network that announced a $2 million general-election ad campaign on September 16, 2026. The campaign, which kicked off the very next day, targets several Republican Senate candidates, with Rounds occupying a prominent slot alongside Julia Letlow in Louisiana, Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi, and Darline Graham in South Carolina.

The money behind the machine

Leading the Future has raised over $140 million for the 2026 midterms, a figure that puts it in the upper echelon of political spending vehicles this cycle. OpenAI President Greg Brockman has personally contributed $25 million. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm better known as a16z, has kicked in more than $50 million. Those two sources alone account for over half the total haul.

By late July 2026, the PAC had already made $28.4 million in independent expenditures across multiple candidates and states. The ads themselves will blanket every medium available: broadcast, cable, streaming, digital platforms, text messages, and old-fashioned physical mail.

Buying goodwill, not swing votes

Rounds isn’t just any Republican senator. He serves as co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus, a position that gives him outsized influence over how Congress approaches artificial intelligence regulation. In August 2024, Rounds introduced a bipartisan AI policy package that covered a wide range of territory. The legislation addressed AI literacy programs, regulatory sandboxes for financial services, and frameworks for deploying AI in healthcare and manufacturing.

A broader trend with real stakes

Leading the Future isn’t operating in isolation. The 2026 midterms have seen tech-sector political spending expand into territories that would have seemed unlikely just two cycles ago. The crypto industry blazed this trail in 2024 with Fairshake, its own super PAC that spent heavily across both parties to elect candidates sympathetic to digital asset regulation.

None of this is illegal, and super PAC spending on behalf of candidates is a well-established feature of American politics. But the concentration of funding from a relatively small number of AI-industry sources, flowing into races where it isn’t needed to secure a win, suggests that the real product being purchased isn’t electoral victory. It’s legislative access. And at $140 million and counting, the AI industry is buying a lot of it.