Federal lobbying disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate on July 20 show OpenAI and Anthropic spent a combined $3.17 million lobbying the U.S. government in the second quarter of 2026 — the largest quarterly outlay either company has reported, and a 23% jump from the first quarter.
Anthropic’s own filing put its April-to-June spending at $1.97 million, up 26% from the prior quarter and enough to overtake Nvidia’s $1.25 million for the period, according to the disclosures. OpenAI reported $1.2 million, an 18% increase, landing just under Nvidia’s total. Add roughly $1.1 million from self-driving unit Waymo, and the three companies’ combined outlay reached a record $4.3 million for the quarter, Bloomberg Government reported.
The increase pushes Anthropic’s first-half 2026 total above $3.5 million, already surpassing the $3.1 million it spent in all of 2025. The company has built out an in-house government-affairs team this year and now retains nine outside firms in Washington, according to the filings.
What the money is buying
Both companies’ lobbying disclosures list similar priorities: cybersecurity, copyright rules for AI training data, cloud-computing and defense procurement, and mandatory safety-testing and transparency requirements for frontier models. Anthropic’s filing specifically names bills such as the MATCH Act and the AI OVERWATCH Act, along with AI-related provisions in the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill, as targets of its outreach to Congress, the White House, and the Commerce and Treasury departments.
The spending surge comes as the White House finalizes a voluntary review framework that would give federal agencies up to 30 days to vet new frontier models for national-security risk before public release — a policy OpenAI and Anthropic have both been negotiating directly with regulators. Both companies are also still litigating copyright disputes over their training data, one of the issue areas named in the new filings.
Still behind Big Tech’s usual spenders
For all the growth, OpenAI and Anthropic remain well behind the industry’s traditional lobbying heavyweights: Meta led all technology firms with $5.99 million in second-quarter spending, followed by Amazon at $4.36 million, according to the disclosures. But the pace of increase among AI labs is outstripping the rest of the sector, reflecting how central regulation has become to the industry’s fortunes as Washington moves toward its first binding rules for frontier AI systems.