OpenAI Bought a Podcast. Check the Org Chart.

OpenAI bought a tech podcast this week. TBPN, a daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, changed hands on April 2. Terms weren't disclosed, but the show pulled $5 million in ad revenue in 2025 and was projected to clear $30 million this year. That part isn't strange. Tech companies buy media properties. What caught my attention is the org chart: TBPN reports directly to Chris Lehane, OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer. Not a content team or a product division. The company's top political operative now runs a media outlet.

That reporting line only makes sense once you see everything else Lehane oversees.

From Zero Lobbyists to $3 Million in Two Years

OpenAI didn't register a single federal lobbyist until Q4 2023. By the end of that quarter, the company had spent $260,000. Decent for a first swing. Then the numbers accelerated.

Full-year 2024: $1.76 million. That's a 577% jump. Full-year 2025: $2.99 million. And the Q1 2025 Senate filing alone shows $620,000 across four in-house lobbyists targeting the Senate, the House, the White House, and the Department of Commerce. The issues listed: AI, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, copyright, and privacy.

Those numbers look modest next to Big Tech incumbents. Meta spent $26.3 million in 2025. Alphabet spent $13.1 million. OpenAI's $3 million is roughly 11% of Meta's total. But the growth curve matters more than the absolute number. OpenAI went from zero lobbyists to a full-stack lobbying operation in 24 months while posting a $5 billion net loss in 2024. And direct lobbying spend is only the floor. It excludes state-level lobbying in California and other states, legal fees, the communications team that doubled in size during 2024, and the global affairs department that grew from 3 people to a target of 50 across offices in Belgium, Ireland, France, India, Singapore, Brazil, the UK, and the U.S.

The Rolodex

Look at who they hired. In-house: a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel via Microsoft, a former Graham staffer. Outside: Akin Gump fielding a former Obama Senate liaison and a former Schumer chief counsel. Hogan Lovells put former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) on the account.

And then there's Lehane. He joined as VP of Global Policy in August 2024 and was later promoted to Chief Global Affairs Officer. Before OpenAI, Lehane was a lawyer in the Clinton White House Counsel's Office who authored the 1995 memo that became the basis for the "vast right-wing conspiracy" framing, co-authored a crisis management playbook called "Masters of Disaster," spent seven years fighting local housing regulation for Airbnb, and then architected the crypto industry's Fairshake super PAC strategy that spent heavily to defeat anti-crypto candidates in 2024. TIME named him one of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2025. His specialty, if you trace the career, is teaching industries how to neutralize regulation before it lands.

None of these are policy generalists. Each one came with a specific rolodex — Pagano knows the Senate Democrats who worked Obama's legislative agenda, Coleman knows the Republican caucus from the inside, Dorn knows Graham's office. OpenAI was buying access to specific people in specific rooms.

The Money Beyond K Street

Direct lobbying is the visible portion. The bigger numbers sit in personal donations and super PAC funding that OpenAI, as a corporation, technically didn't make.

Sam Altman donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund in December 2024, a notable pivot for someone whose FEC history shows $200,000 to the Biden Victory Fund in 2023 and $250,000 to Senate Majority PAC in 2018. Senators Warren and Bennet wrote Altman pointing out that OpenAI was under active FTC and SEC investigations at the time of the donation. Two days after Trump took office, Altman stood at the White House podium for the Stargate announcement.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's co-founder and president, and his wife Anna jointly donated $25 million to MAGA Inc. in September 2025, per FEC filings. That was the largest single donation in that six-month fundraising cycle, nearly 25% of MAGA Inc.'s $102 million haul for the period. Five months later, OpenAI announced a Pentagon deal for classified AI deployment, hours after the Trump administration directed agencies to phase out Anthropic technology.

Then there's Leading the Future, the super PAC launched in 2025 that raised $125 million from Brockman, his wife, and several top OpenAI investors. Lehane acknowledged the executive and investor donations in a February 2026 memo to staff while noting that OpenAI as a company was not a direct donor. The PAC's stated goal: a "national regulatory framework" for AI. In practice, that means blocking state-level safety laws. The PAC already ran ads opposing New York Assemblyman Alex Bores, who authored the RAISE Act — we covered that spending in detail last week.

I keep coming back to that corporate/personal distinction. Lehane is careful to say OpenAI didn't write the checks. But the people writing the checks run OpenAI, and the policy outcomes they're buying benefit OpenAI directly.

What the Spending Bought

OpenAI's AI Action Plan submission to the White House explicitly called for federal preemption of state AI safety laws. Trump's December 2025 executive order directed agencies not to fund states with "burdensome" AI regulations, tracking OpenAI's submission almost exactly. California's SB 1047, the most ambitious state-level AI safety bill, was vetoed by Governor Newsom in September 2024 after opposition from OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz, Google's trade groups, and Meta.

On the legal front, OpenAI issued subpoenas to at least seven nonprofits that had signed petitions critical of the company's for-profit conversion. Six of the seven had no involvement in the Musk lawsuit that nominally justified the subpoenas. The demands covered all information about funders, donations, and communications about Musk, Meta, and Zuckerberg. Legal experts described the move as designed to overwhelm smaller organizations with legal costs.

This Playbook Has a Track Record

OpenAI didn't invent this approach. Other tech industries have run it before, and we know what happened afterward.

In 2020, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart spent $205 million on California's Proposition 22, the most expensive ballot measure in state history. The goal: override AB5, which had classified gig workers as employees entitled to minimum wage, overtime, and benefits. Prop 22 created a carve-out. It passed with 58.6% of the vote. A National Equity Atlas study later found that after subtracting the benefits employees receive but contractors don't, drivers' net take-home pay dropped to $6.20 an hour. CalMatters reported in 2024 that no state agency actually enforces the law's limited protections. The California Supreme Court upheld Prop 22 unanimously that same year. The companies wrote the law themselves, spent 10x what the opposition could raise to get it passed, and included an amendment clause requiring seven-eighths of the legislature to change it. That threshold has never been met in modern California politics. The law is functionally permanent.

The privacy fight ran the same play at the federal level. After years of opposing any regulation, Facebook pivoted in 2019 to calling for a federal privacy law — specifically one that would preempt stronger state laws. The EFF called it "a disingenuous ploy to undermine real progress on privacy being made around the country at the state level." Meta spent $19-20 million a year on federal lobbying. The Markup documented 445 lobbyists across 31 states working to weaken privacy bills, with a Virginia state senator confirming on the record that "the first draft of that legislation was written by an Amazon lobbyist." Two federal privacy bills — ADPPA in 2022, APRA in 2024 — both died. The U.S. still has no comprehensive federal privacy law. The state laws that did pass were written with industry-drafted provisions baked in: no private right of action, narrow definitions of data "selling," opt-out instead of opt-in.

And then there's the one Lehane built himself. Fairshake, the crypto super PAC Lehane architected before joining OpenAI, raised $260 million in the 2024 cycle and spent $87 million on elections. It went 53 for 58 in targeted races. Fairshake spent over $10 million to knock out Katie Porter in a California Senate primary and committed $40 million to defeat Sherrod Brown in Ohio — the Senate Banking Committee chairman who'd been blocking crypto legislation. Brown lost. The committee flipped. Pro-crypto bills that had been stalled for years started moving. Coinbase donated $25 million to Fairshake within days of Biden vetoing a crypto custody bill. Coinbase wired that money within days of the veto.

Lehane left Fairshake for OpenAI in August 2024. Within months, Leading the Future launched with $125 million and the same mission statement adapted for AI: elect candidates who support federal preemption, target candidates who wrote state safety laws. Lehane built Fairshake's playbook, then carried it to OpenAI and built Leading the Future on the same blueprint.

What's Genuinely Complicated

Some of the policy positions aren't pure self-interest. The argument against a patchwork of 50 state AI laws has real merit, and SB 1047's critics included AI researchers worried about vague liability language, not just industry lobbyists. OpenAI's stated red lines on the Pentagon deal (no autonomous weapons, no mass surveillance, human-in-the-loop) are more restrictive than competitors like xAI. And Lehane is careful to note that OpenAI as a corporation didn't write those PAC checks. That distinction is legally real even if the practical effect is the same.

Still. In 2023, Sam Altman sat before Congress and asked to be regulated. Two years later, the company he runs burns $9 billion a year in operating costs while losing $5 billion, and somehow found the budget for 50 global affairs staff, four in-house lobbyists, outside firms including a former senator, a $125 million super PAC network funded by its own executives, legal action against seven nonprofits, and a media acquisition. All of it running through one department, under one person, using a playbook that already neutralized regulation for gig workers, killed two successive federal privacy bills, flipped a Senate banking committee, and left the industries it targeted functionally ungoverned.

The $2.99 million in LD-2 filings is the only number OpenAI has to disclose. Add the PAC network, the legal bills, the 50-person global affairs department, the comms team, the media acquisition, and the actual price tag for this operation starts looking very different.

What Happens Next

Gig workers found out what Prop 22 cost them after it passed — $6.20 an hour net, according to the National Equity Atlas, after subtracting the benefits contractors don't get. The U.S. still has no federal privacy law. Crypto got its committee chairs and its bills started moving. In each case, the industry got to set the terms of its own regulation, and the people affected most found out what that meant after the window to change it had closed. OpenAI's version of that accounting comes when the S-1 lands — assuming it does. That filing will be the first time investors can see how much of their capital is going into political infrastructure rather than the AI research they thought they were funding. Right now, $2.99 million in LD-2 filings is the only number anyone is required to show them.