Ron Conway, the billionaire Silicon Valley investor and Democratic megadonor, was seeing red this time last year. His allies in the cryptocurrency industry super PAC group Fairshake had bought a splashy $12 million worth of ads backing the Republican challenger to Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio)—just before he was set to meet with then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in the hopes of advancing crypto industry-friendly legislation. In a supremely ticked-off email to the founders of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and other crypto titans, Conway broke up with the Fairshake group, to which he had donated $500,000.
Conway seems to have mended fences with a16z’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, for the sake of the artificial intelligence industry. He’s helping to fund a new AI industry group, Leading the Future (LTF), launched by a16z and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, according to the Wall Street Journal. Other LTF backers include Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder and VC investor who is a confidant of Elon Musk, and AI search engine Perplexity. The new undertaking says in a press release it will advocate for AI policies and oppose candidates it deems unsupportive of AI’s growth, highlighting its concerns that China will dominate in global AI.
LTF says it has amassed $100 million from the industry. Also, Meta announced today that it will spend tens of millions through a new California-focused super PAC backing candidates who will endorse lighter regulation of technology, in particular AI.
There’s no missing that the group is running the crypto industry playbook: LTF, like Fairshake, says it will combine “federal and state Super PACs and 501(c)(4) issue advocacy organizations, giving it maximum flexibility to engage in the 2026 election cycle and beyond.” LTF’s two staff are Zac Moffatt, CEO of the Republican digital firm Targeted Victory, and Josh Vlasto, a former press secretary to Sen. Chuck Schumer and chief of staff to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo—a Fairshake spokesperson since 2023. The group plans to create candidate scorecards, as did the Coinbase-founded project Stand With Crypto Alliance.
