OpenAI Employees Forced Greg Brockman to Abandon $25M Super PAC Pledge

A wave of internal dissent at OpenAI — documented through leaked Slack messages — pushed company president Greg Brockman to back out of the second half of a $50 million personal commitment to Leading the Future (LTF), a super PAC set up to shield AI from regulation. The reversal came after employees spent weeks flagging reputational damage, talent-retention risks, and the PAC's increasingly erratic political tactics in company Slack channels.

The controversy began building in earnest around June 1, when chief strategy officer Jason Kwon posted a multi-paragraph Slack message attempting to draw a clean line between OpenAI and LTF — insisting Brockman's involvement was personal, not institutional. The message earned more than 80 approving reactions, but the goodwill lasted roughly an hour before employees began picking it apart. Critics pointed to LTF's pattern of backfiring attacks, its ties to a sister lobbying group called Build American AI (BAAI) that doesn't disclose donors, and an X account one employee described as a sockpuppet posting bizarre attacks on Sam Altman. Twenty-two colleagues responded to that last detail with some variation of disbelief.

The tipping point came June 11, when a journalist reported that a director of BAAI had texted that OpenAI was among four funders — a claim OpenAI denied. Brockman weighed in directly for the first time, denied the company backed BAAI, apologized for the controversy, and announced he was pulling his remaining $25 million pledge. His message received 40 hearts and five checkmarks. A day later, Kwon acknowledged the company had taken real reputational hits and said he wished clearer public lines had been drawn sooner.

The episode exposes a specific fault line at frontier AI labs: employees — the scarce, highly sought-after researchers that OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google are all fighting over — are not the deregulation advocates their employers' political spending might suggest. Many are deeply concerned about AI safety and bristled at being associated with a PAC that targeted Alex Bores, a New York state assemblymember and AI safety advocate running for Congress. Numerous OpenAI employees donated to Bores' campaign. LTF's strategic miscalculation was compounded when candidates it backed came out in favor of a Bernie Sanders–Greg Casar bill that would pause frontier AI development and criminalize attempts to build superintelligence — precisely OpenAI's stated mission.

The broader implication is that Silicon Valley employee activism didn't die — it relocated and mutated. Where a decade ago Google and Facebook workers pushed on social justice issues, OpenAI's staff is leveraging an extraordinarily tight talent market to push back on the politics of their own product's deployment. Notably, Brockman's separate $25 million donation to MAGA Inc. — widely expected to be the bigger internal flashpoint — turned out to be a relative non-issue among staff, even as it appears to have bought OpenAI goodwill with the Trump administration amid a stream of reports about rogue AI agents hacking companies and governments.