Record Q3 lobbying by Nvidia, Anthropic and OpenAI
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
Q3 2026 lobbying disclosures (filed Oct 20–21, 2026) show record federal lobbying spending by Nvidia (~$2.2M), Anthropic (~$2.1M) and OpenAI (~$1.5M), with Meta leading Big Tech at $5.9M.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 22 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra174 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5113 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 4 Argon204 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7143 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 113 days before it.
Key facts
- Quarter: July–September 2026; LD-2 disclosures filed Oct 20, reported Oct 21–22 by Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law, Semafor and The Verge
- Nvidia: nearly $2.2M, its largest disclosed quarter (Bloomberg); LD-2 data cited by FourWeekMBA gives $2.15M, up from $1.25M in Q2
- Anthropic: $2.11M in Q3 (prior quarters $1.97M and $1.01M), about $5.6M year to date; OpenAI: $1.53M (prior $1.20M and $0.92M), nearly $3.8M year to date (Bloomberg Law). All three were company records
- Meta led Big Tech with $5.9M in Q3 (Semafor)
- Topic (Semafor): both OpenAI and Anthropic lobbied on information sharing between AI companies without violating antitrust rules; Anthropic’s disclosure names the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act, OpenAI’s names no specific bill
- The Verge’s figures as summarised by Techmeme ($2.2M, $2.1M, $1.5M) match Bloomberg Law’s to the rounding
- Confidence: medium — The Verge, Bloomberg, Bloomberg Law and Semafor are all blocked or paywalled for us; the figures here come from search summaries of those reports and from FourWeekMBA’s and Crypto Briefing’s accounts of the LD-2 filings
What happened
The quarterly lobbying disclosures put numbers on how hard the AI industry is now working Washington: three company records in one quarter, two weeks before the US midterms. The substantive detail is what the labs asked for — an antitrust safe harbour for sharing information about threats, the thing that has repeatedly come up after the year’s agent-hacking incidents.
Why it matters
The amounts are small next to the super-PAC money already documented for the midterms, but the disclosed subject matter is a concrete policy ask: labs want to be able to tell each other about attacks and dangerous capabilities without antitrust exposure.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 press
Press
- Crypto Briefing: Nvidia spends a record nearly $2.2 million on federal lobbying in Q3cryptobriefing.com, press
- FourWeekMBA: Nvidia’s Q3 lobbying jumped 72% to $2.15M, filings showfourweekmba.com, press
- Semafor: Meta tops Big Tech lobbying as AI labs talk antitrustsemafor.com, press
Changes
- Filed (blocked; figures from Bloomberg Law/Semafor summaries and the LD-2 reports)