OpenAI Secretly Lobbying For Gov Bailout

In November of last year, Sam Alman sent OpenAI CFO Sarah Frier onto television to beg for a government bailout. This bailout request provoked widespread condemnation and was swiftly rejected by the government. We made a video about this at the time which is linked in the description below. Today, we must return to this topic. Recently revealed information shows that the extent of Alman's greed and treachery is far worse than we originally believed. First, we need a quick refresh of OpenAI's original bailout requests in November. Sarah Frier said, quote, "We're looking for ways the government can come to bear. A backs stop, a guarantee that allows the financing to happen, can really drop the cost of financing, and also increase the amount of debt you can take on. " unquote. For context, OpenAI and its partners are planning to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to fund a reckless data center buildout. Open AAI wants the government to effectively cosign these loans with taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars of losses in the event that OpenAI defaults. The existence of this government guarantee would allow OpenAI to borrow far more money than they could on their own. When Sarah Frier publicly asked for a government bailout, she was testing the waters. OpenAI wanted to see what the public reaction would be. The reaction was very negative. So Alman did what he does best, obfiscate and lie. A day after Frier's public bailout request, he published a tweet saying that OpenAI does not want government guarantees for its data centers and taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions. This is obviously not true, seeing as just one day prior, OpenAI's CFO asked for exactly that. With this fiasco, Alman realized that he had overplayed his hand. To secure taxpayer money, he first needs to shift public opinion. On May 1st, 2026, Wired published an investigative report exposing a secretive propaganda campaign orchestrated by OpenAI. The goal is to frame taxpayer subsidies not as a bailout of Silicon Valley tech bros, but instead as a national security priority in a supposed AI race against China.

OpenAI has been pushing the China narrative for a very long time. In November of 2024, they published a document called OpenAI's infrastructure blueprint for the US. In the report, they tried to justify the scale of their data center buildout and the massive spending commitment Sam Alman was signing up for. In the document, OpenAI invokes a spectre of America's two main geopolitical rivals, Russia and China. The document states, quote, "As Sam Alman has laid out, technology brought the world from the stone age to the agricultural age to the industrial age and from here the path to the intelligence age is paved with compute, energy, and human will. " Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that whoever wins on AI will control the world. The US is leading on AI innovation, but China, fixated on seizing the lead by 2030, is building faster, harnessing government controlled data and increasing its production of chips and energy. Energy above all is critical to the US maintaining its lead. Given the stakes, we need to think big, act big, and build big. The history of the US is one of iconic infrastructure projects that move the country forward. The auto industry, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Manhattan Project, the interstate highway system. We need a national strategy now to ensure that investment in AI infrastructure benefits and protects American competitiveness, our national security, and that of our allies. There are a few notable things to point out. Russia is not a serious player in the AI industry. Vladimir Putin has no relevance to the supposed AI race. OpenAI invokes his name purely for scaremongering purposes. Next, they talk about China. They specifically talk about the Chinese government's control of data and investments in semiconductor and energy industries. The implication is clear. China will surpass the US in AI development because of extensive government subsidies and other support. Therefore, the US government should also provide massive subsidies of which OpenAI will be the chief beneficiary. If you have any doubt about OpenAI's desire for taxpayer money, they go on to invoke the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Manhattan Project, and the Interstate Highway System, all of which were government funded projects from the last century. In 2025, OpenAI's demands for government subsidies became more explicit. In October of that year, they sent a letter to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is part of the US government. In the letter, OpenAI recommends that the US government provides grants, loans, and loan guarantees to expand data center production. This is again framed as countering the People's Republic of China. Notice that OpenAI was already asking for loan guarantees, but at this point, it was still pretty vague. One month later in November, Sarah Frier removes any doubt about OpenAI's intentions when she explicitly asks for the US government to guarantee loans for OpenAI's data centers. Open AAI's first plan of just asking for a government bailout failed. So, they moved on to plan B. Plan B is to run a secretive lobbying and propaganda campaign to manipulate public opinion.

While Sam Alman is a public face of the company, another man who is arguably just as important is OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman. Brockman has been with OpenAI from the beginning and is widely seen as Altman's right-hand man. First, we need to understand what type of guy Greg Brockman is. He maintained a private diary which was exposed during the ongoing Musk OpenAI lawsuit. Back in 2017, OpenAI was still pretending to be a nonprofit. At that time, Brockman wrote in his diary that he wanted to personally make1 billion dollars from OpenAI. It now appears that Brockman is taking the lead in OpenAI's dark money propaganda efforts. In late 2025, Greg Brockman personally donated $25 million to a proTrump political action committee. Brockman has never been outspoken about politics and has not made any large political contributions in the past. This donation was clearly an effort to gain favor with the Trump administration. But this was only the beginning of OpenAI's secretive influence campaign. Also in 2025, Brockman co-founded a political action committee called Leading the Future. Leading the Future raised over $100 million from a number of donors, including Greg Brockman and the venture capital firm Andre Horowitz, which is a major shareholder in Open AI. Leading the Future supports both Democrat and Republican congressional candidates who are pro AI. This pack operates transparently. Federal election laws require candidates to disclose who donates money to their campaigns. But Brockman also wanted to have some more covert influence. So he created another pack called Build American AI. This pack is also funded by Brockman, Andre Horowitz, and other AI executives. While Leading the Future operates in the open, Build American AI operates in the shadows. They run so-called dark money campaigns, the details of which are deliberately hidden from the public. They pay social media influencers to post proAI and anti-China videos. Because they're not supporting any particular political campaign, their spending is not subject to federal election laws. That's why it's called dark money. The goal is to shift public opinion. They want people to view the AI industry as a matter of national security. Once public opinion has been sufficiently manipulated, OpenAI will probably try again to secure a government bailout. The only reason we know about this is because they reached out to a journalist and YouTuber named Taylor Loren offering her thousands of dollars to post proAI Tik Tok videos. But instead of taking their money, she decided to expose them. In addition to being a YouTuber, she is also a writer for the technology focused publication Wired. She wrote an article exposing OpenAI based on her own experience having been offered money by them. The Pat gave her talking points of what the sponsored Tik Tok video should say. Quote, "I just learned that China is really trying hard to beat the US in AI. If they do, it means that China gets personal data from me and my kids and takes jobs that should be here in the US in the AI innovation race. I'm team USA. " Here's an example of an Instagram post that was paid for by Build American AI. According to Loren, influencers are being paid as much as $5,000 for each video they post on Tik Tok or Instagram. Build American AI hired two different marketing agencies to run its propaganda campaign. One agency is tasked with sponsoring left-wing influencers, while the second right-wing influencers. So, what is the ultimate goal of this covert propaganda campaign? They're trying to promote the supposed threat of Chinese AI. When OpenAI begged for a government bailout last year, they specifically cited competition with China as a justification. If you put two and two together, it's pretty obvious what they're angling for. Spending $100 million on a political influence campaign is a small price to pay if you can secure government loan guarantees, which could be worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

While Brockman works from the shadows, Sam Alman continues to be the public face of OpenAI. Over the past few years, man has been extremely visible, perhaps more so than the CEO of any other company. He gives huge numbers of interviews to the mainstream media and gives many hour-ong interviews on various podcasts and YouTube channels. This is understandable. Alman is trying to promote OpenAI's upcoming IPO. He wants to convince as many retail investors as possible to buy shares of his company. But in recent months, Alman's hunger for airtime has reached a point of being almost ridiculous. Just in the past two weeks, he's been on the Core Memory podcast which got 91,000 views, the Mostly Human podcast, which got 47,000 views, the Nothing But Tech podcast, which got 41,000 views, and the Stripe podcast, which got just 40,000 views. I'm not trying to disparage these podcasts by calling them small, but these podcast appearances are typically more than an hour long, and Alman travels all the way to the podcast studio to give the interview. Alman is a CEO of a company that claims to be worth $800 billion and is supposedly revolutionizing technology in society. So, how does he have time to be flying all around the country to appear on no-name podcasts that very few people watch? The relatively low viewership of Altman's podcast appearances may have motivated OpenAI to focus more on Brockman's dark money influence campaigns. All right, guys, that wraps it up for this video. What do you think about OpenAI? Let us know in the comments section below. As always, thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one.