OpenAI’s presence in Washington has moved from emerging to unmistakable. A new disclosure filed on January 22 shows the company spent $1.76 million on government lobbying in 2024, including $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone.
That is a sharp rise from 2023, when OpenAI spent $260,000 on Capitol Hill. The spending remains far below the largest Big Tech lobbying operations, but the direction is clear: OpenAI wants a stronger hand in shaping government AI policy.
A rapid expansion in Washington
The disclosure points to a company building a more formal political operation. OpenAI listed a new in-house lobbyist, Meghan Dorn, who worked for five years for Senator Lindsey Graham and started at OpenAI in October.
The filing also shows activity tied to two pieces of legislation in the final months of the year. One was the House’s AI Advancement and Reliability Act, which would create a government center for AI research. The other was the Senate’s Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act, which would create shared benchmark tests for AI models.
OpenAI did not respond to questions about its lobbying efforts. Even without a public explanation from the company, the disclosure gives a clear view of its priorities: Congress, federal agencies, AI research infrastructure, and the rules that could define how powerful AI systems are tested and governed.
The timing matters. OpenAI’s first year of serious lobbying ended as Republican control of Washington began. Its spending is still dwarfed by peers such as Meta, which spent more than $24 million in 2024, but OpenAI’s increase shows that the company is no longer operating at the edge of the policy conversation.
From AI harms to AI infrastructure
After ChatGPT launched in November 2022, AI regulation began to develop in earnest. Much of the early debate centered on responsibility, including sexually abusive deepfake images and election disinformation.
At that stage, lawmakers were focused on harms that were visible to the public and politically urgent. OpenAI’s earlier disclosures show that its lobbyists spent much of last year on legislation such as the No Fakes Act and the Protect Elections from Deceptive AI Act. Those bills did not become law.
But the center of gravity shifted as the year continued. Liana Keesing, campaigns manager for technology reform at Issue One, described the change this way: “One of the biggest shifts that we’ve seen,” Keesing says, “is that they’ve really started to focus on energy.”
That shift changes the policy conversation. Instead of only asking how AI companies will reduce risks, Washington is increasingly hearing that the United States must help the industry grow. The argument links AI development to national security, US competitiveness with China, and access to the infrastructure needed to train advanced models.
Energy, data centers, and national security
In September, Sam Altman joined leaders from Nvidia, Anthropic, and Google at the White House. The group presented the view that US competitiveness in AI depends on subsidized energy infrastructure for training the best models.
Altman proposed to the Biden administration the construction of multiple five-gigawatt data centers. Each would consume as much electricity as New York City.
Around the same period, companies including Meta and Microsoft began describing nuclear energy as a path forward for AI, with deals aimed at firing up new nuclear power plants. OpenAI’s own policy hiring suggests it was preparing for the energy turn: in April, it hired lobbyist Matthew Rimkunas, who worked for Bill Gates’s sustainable energy effort Breakthrough Energies and previously spent 16 years working for Senator Graham.
OpenAI has also tied AI development to democratic values and geopolitical competition. In a blog post in October, the company wrote, “AI is a transformational technology that can be used to strengthen democratic values or to undermine them. That’s why we believe democracies should continue to take the lead in AI development.”
In December, OpenAI went further by reversing its policy against working with the military. It announced that it would develop AI models with the defense-tech company Anduril to help take down drones around military bases.
Political alignment and unresolved fights
OpenAI’s policy position has developed as Silicon Valley’s relationship with President Trump’s circle has become more visible. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai sat directly behind Trump’s family at the inauguration on Monday, and Altman also attended. Many had made sizable donations to Trump’s inaugural fund, with Altman personally contributing $1 million.
But the appearance of alignment does not mean the industry agrees on everything. Several disputes could shape the next phase of AI policy:
- H-1B visas: Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy pushed for expanding the visa program, while some allies of the Trump administration objected, including Steve Bannon.
- Open- and closed-source AI: Google and OpenAI keep the details of their most powerful models closed. Meta’s Llama model is open-source, and Meta recently sided with Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
- Bias and free speech: AI model moderation may splinter as social media moderation approaches diverge. Altman told The Free Press, “No two people are ever going to agree that one system is perfectly unbiased.”
Those fights sit alongside a broader push for more infrastructure and a friendlier policy environment. The White House has repealed many executive orders signed by President Biden, including the landmark order on AI that imposed rules for government use of the technology, while appearing to keep Biden’s order on leasing land for more data centers.
What OpenAI’s lobbying increase signals
The $1.76 million figure is not only a spending number. It is a signal that OpenAI sees public policy as central to its business and to the future of AI development in the United States.
The company is pressing into debates over AI regulation, benchmark tests, federal research capacity, energy infrastructure, national security, and data centers. It is also doing so at a moment when Washington is deciding whether AI should be treated mainly as a risk to be controlled, an industry to be supported, or both at once.
OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank reportedly plan to spend up to $500 billion on a joint venture for new data centers. The project was announced by President Trump, with Altman standing alongside. According to Axios, Altman will also join a closed-door briefing with government officials on January 30, reportedly about OpenAI’s development of a powerful new AI agent.
The next phase of AI policy will not be shaped only by technical performance. It will also be shaped by lobbying, infrastructure demands, national security claims, and disagreements among the companies building the technology.