Anthropic Is About to Get Millions of New Fact-Checkers
Capitol and Capital is a Think Big series on the businesses engaging state and federal capitals to shape policy.
Anthropic filed its S-1 Monday, setting up what Bloomberg, the AP and others have reported could be the largest IPO in history. Most of the coverage has focused on the valuation and the company’s unusually blunt warnings about catastrophic AI risk. From a “Washington DC Public Affairs” standpoint, I’d point folks to a different set of filings that landed the week before.
Q3 lobbying disclosures show Anthropic spent roughly $2.1 million lobbying the federal government last quarter, according to an analysis reported by Yahoo Finance. That’s about double its biggest quarter in all of 2025, and more than OpenAI’s roughly $1.5 million. Earlier this year the company also put $20 million into Public First Action, a group backing candidates of both parties who favor AI regulation. Anthropic later said the money couldn’t be used for election ads.
None of that is unusual for a company of its size. What changes is who’s paying attention to all of this information.
A private company answers to its investors in a conference room. Once it lists, the audience grows to every shareholder with a proxy vote, every pension fund with a governance policy, and every analyst covering the stock. I saw how critical those analysts were in my days with Rock Ventures, working on the IPO of Rocket Companies. Political spending is one of the first places those people look, and proposals asking companies to disclose it show up every proxy season.
Anthropic’s filing becomes an immediate test of the brand. Dario Amodei used his own website in September to call for slowing AI development. The company has built its identity as the safety-first lab, and it’s currently in court with the Pentagon over its refusal to allow unrestricted military use of its models. Every dollar it spends in Washington will now be measured against this notion of “safety first.”
Shrewd followers are already asking whether the company’s lobbying lives up to its brand promise, or simply protects its market position. Last quarter’s filings list kids’ online safety provisions, export controls and data center electricity costs, which suggests some of both.
I’d argue the dichotomy is healthy. After all, their new shareholders are about to become the most persistent fact-checkers Anthropic has ever had.
The other part of this story is how quickly Anthropic built its Washington presence. The company spent about $180,000 on lobbying in the first quarter of 2024, its first as a registered lobbying client, according to the Washington Examiner. This past quarter came in more than ten times higher. In about two and a half years, Anthropic went from a name much of Capitol Hill didn’t know to a company that funds a political group, sues the Pentagon and outspends OpenAI on lobbying.
That speed matters for the brand. Most companies spend years introducing themselves in this town before they pick a fight. Anthropic’s Washington reputation was formed in the middle of several, and I’d guess plenty of lawmakers know it first for what it opposes. “Safety first” reads as responsible to some offices and as obstruction to others, and the IPO hands every one of those audiences a new reason to look closer.
Anyone who watched PhRMA and its member companies build their presence in Washington through the 1990s and 2000s will recognize the pattern, and it’s the kind of positioning work we spend a lot of time on at Think Big. The difference is speed. The drug industry had more than a decade to line up what it said in public with what it funded in private. Anthropic has had about two and a half years, and it’s the first of the big AI labs to try it as a public company.
To be clear, Anthropic’s Washington spending isn’t the problem. The risk is a gap between message and money that shareholders, reporters and opponents now have every incentive to find. Once the stock starts trading, each quarterly disclosure becomes a story... and some of those stories will be written by the people who most want the company to fail.
—Aaron Walker, Managing Director, Strategic Communications, Think Big
