Ben McAdams wants a seat in Congress, where he would help write the rules for artificial intelligence. He also owns a piece of an AI data center going up outside Delta.
He is one of two Utah candidates carrying the money of the national AI fight into the June 23 primaries. Two super PACs spent a combined $1.3 million on the state's races this month. One was seeded by a co-founder of OpenAI. The other was funded by Anthropic. They want opposite things from Washington, and they spent on opposite candidates.
The money tied to OpenAI's co-founder backed McAdams. Think Big PAC reserved $450,000 in television time for him in the Democratic primary for the new 1st District. Think Big is one arm of Leading the Future, a network the investors behind it have stocked with more than $100 million. Its donors include the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who with his wife has given $25 million. OpenAI itself does not write these checks. The company does not donate to political committees, Brockman gives as a private citizen, and Leading the Future spends to block state AI laws in favor of a single federal standard.
The Anthropic-funded side backed a Republican. Defending Our Values, a committee run by former Representative Chris Stewart, spent nearly $880,000 on ads for Representative Celeste Maloy in the GOP primary for the new 3rd District. The committee draws from Public First Action, the bipartisan nonprofit Stewart leads with former Oklahoma Representative Brad Carson. Anthropic seeded that nonprofit with $20 million in February to back candidates who want testing, transparency, and child-safety rules for AI. Anthropic has since said the money was not meant for federal election spending, which clouds the trail between the company and the Maloy ads.
In Utah the regulation side spent the larger sum. Nationally it is the underdog, its $20 million seed against Leading the Future's nine figures.
Both Utah races took their odd new shapes from a court-ordered map. A judge struck down the Legislature's congressional plan and replaced it with one that added a Democratic-leaning seat. Maloy represents the 2nd District and is running in the 3rd. The 1st, redrawn around Salt Lake City, leans Democratic for the first time. McAdams, the last Democrat to hold a Utah seat in Congress, is one of four Democrats running for it.
The stakes sit on Utah ground. Near Delta, Creekstone Energy broke ground last year on a campus it says will draw 10 gigawatts from its own power supply. McAdams owns stock in that project. He told The Salt Lake Tribune he took the shares as payment for work on its renewable power, and that he opposes a second, larger data center, the Stratos Project in Box Elder County. He has not named the company publicly, and the reporting on his disclosure does not either. His opponent, state Senator Nate Blouin, wants a moratorium on new AI construction and calls the race an effort to buy a Utah seat. Both oppose Stratos.
Maloy worked as Stewart's chief legal counsel before she ran to replace him, after he resigned in 2023 to care for his ailing wife. Her opponent, Phil Lyman, has tried to make the Anthropic money her problem. Maloy says she cannot coordinate with outside groups, and the committee behind her says it has no position on data centers. Lyman is not satisfied. "You don't need to coordinate with someone to know they're buying your steak dinner," he told the Deseret News.
