OpenSecrets

OpenSecrets is a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization that tracks money in American politics — campaign contributions, federal and state lobbying expenditures, revolving-door personnel, and dark-money flows — and publishes the underlying data as open infrastructure for journalists, policymakers, and the public. It was founded in 1983 as the Center for Responsive Politics by retired U.S. Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Hugh Scott (R-Pennsylvania) with a mandate to track money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy. In 2021 the organization merged with the National Institute on Money in Politics — which had operated FollowTheMoney.org since 1999 — and rebranded as OpenSecrets, consolidating the two leading money-in-politics databases into a single institution. Its stated mission is to serve as the trusted authority on money in American politics and to help Americans use that data to create a more representative democracy.

OpenSecrets enters the corpus through its systematic original investigation of AI-industry political spending — a body of work that functions as primary public accountability infrastructure for the movement challenging AI industry capture of the policy process.

AI lobbying investigations

The organization's AI tracking program has produced both standing data infrastructure and original investigative reporting across three streams.

"The AI-fication of K Street" (February 2026). This investigation documented the transformation of Washington's lobbying landscape by AI. Analyzing five years of Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, OpenSecrets found that the number of organizations lobbying on AI reached 774 in 2025 — a 423 percent increase from 2020 — while the volume of lobby reports mentioning AI exceeded 3,500, a 505 percent increase over the same period. The sharp turn came in 2023, when AI-tagged clients tripled over the prior year and AI-related reports more than doubled. The investigation traced the spread beyond tech into sectors the movement had not previously mapped: the count of AI-active clients in health care grew 64 percent between 2023 and 2024; in finance, insurance, and real estate the count grew 96 percent, significantly outstripping the 44 percent overall AI-lobbying growth rate. The defense-sector findings documented firms including Lockheed Martin, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and Honeywell International maintaining multimillion-dollar lobbying footprints that increasingly cited AI within the context of specific weapons platforms and contract awards.

"Data Centers Are Fueling the Lobbying Industry" (November 2025). This investigation tracked the infrastructure layer of the lobbying surge. OpenSecrets documented that the Data Center Coalition — whose membership includes Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Oracle — more than doubled its lobbying spend in a single quarter, from roughly $125,000 per quarter to $360,000 in Q3 2025. The four largest cloud providers reported tens of millions of dollars in combined federal lobbying expenditures in 2025 alone. The electric manufacturing and equipment sector reported over $226 million in lobbying activity in 2025 to support AI data center expansion and the resulting strain on the power grid. The investigation named Dominion Energy — the largest electricity supplier for Northern Virginia's data-center corridor — as spending $2.4 million on lobbying during the period.

Quarterly AI company tracking. OpenSecrets publishes quarterly updates on individual AI companies' lobbying filings. In 2025 OpenAI spent $2.99 million on federal lobbying. In the first half of 2026 Anthropic's spend accelerated sharply: Q2 2026 filings showed Anthropic at $1.97 million and OpenAI at $1.2 million — a combined $3.17 million, up 23 percent from Q1. Anthropic's first-half 2026 total exceeded $3.5 million, surpassing the $3.1 million it reported for the entirety of 2025.

The organization began tracking AI-era Big Tech lobbying in May 2023 within weeks of ChatGPT's rise to public prominence. Total AI-tagged lobbying has grown from approximately $1.8 million in 2013 to over $70 million projected for 2026.

Data infrastructure

In January 2024, OpenSecrets launched a combined state-and-federal lobbying spending tracker enabling tracking of lobbying activity across jurisdictions in a single platform. The organization's data systems apply machine learning and natural language processing to the continuous ingestion and categorization of lobbying disclosure filings, a capability recognized by a 2024 Amazon Web Services IMAGINE Grant for Nonprofits.

Organization

OpenSecrets is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Washington, DC. Hilary Braseth became Executive Director in January 2024, succeeding Sheila Krumholz who had led the organization since 2006. Braseth previously served as a Public Service Fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and as a Technology Policy Design Fellow at the Aspen Institute. The organization's 2023 revenue was $2.5 million against $4.3 million in expenditures. Funders include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Democracy Fund, the Hewlett Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.