A little-known group stacked with lobbyists for the artificial intelligence industry has been sending congressional staffers on upscale trips over the past year to tour AI companies in San Francisco, London, New York City, and Los Angeles, according to House and Senate gift travel disclosures. On the junkets, sponsored by the Innovative Future Collective (IFC), senior congressional aides are taken through visits to Big Tech companies like Meta and Amazon and MAGA-aligned defense contractors like Palantir and Anduril.
The nonprofit IFC says it brings together “industry, government, and experts” and “allows lawmakers to directly witness AI’s capabilities” and “understand its applications.” Its Advisory Committee is dominated by corporate interests: of its 15 members, 12 are current or recent corporate lobbyists, including at least six lobbyists for AI companies like OpenAI and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Another advisor, Gerry Patrella, is general manager of U.S. public policy for Microsoft, which has committed around $145 billion this year in capital expenditures, largely for AI infrastructure. These AI companies are engaged in a sprawling influence campaign to push for federal preemption legislation that would block states from passing AI protections and override state laws already on the books.
IFC, founded in December 2024, releases little information about the AI policies that House and Senate staffers have been hearing about on their trips while staying at locations like London’s five-star Marriott Hotel Grosvenor Square. IFC was formed by political fundraising firm Fulkerson Kennedy & Company (FK&Co.), whose founders tout the “record dollar amounts” they have raised for Senate Democratic clients like Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. The firm also advertises its political funding strategy services in arranging corporate partnerships for unnamed clients.
IFC’s sponsored trips for Hill staffers come as the AI industry gears up to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the 2026 midterms against House and Senate candidates it deems unsupportive of its agenda. Though IFC’s founders are fundraisers for the Schumer-aligned Senate Majority PAC and others, its advisors lobby for AI companies now funding attack ads against Democrats in primaries through the super PAC Leading the Future. One target is New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, a House candidate who co-authored AI safety legislation titled the RAISE Act that would apply to large companies spending over $100 million on AI models. IFC’s advisors are rounded out by government affairs executives and lobbyists at Coinbase, the cryptocurrency giant that flooded the last election cycle with outside spending and is prepared to unleash even more this cycle, and Stripe, which lobbies on crypto issues.
