He may not be a household name yet, but Greg Brockman is among the world’s most powerful individuals. The OpenAI co-founder is one of President Trump’s richest and most generous financial backers, and is spending tens of millions of dollars to fight A.I. regulation. He is using OpenAI to produce hi-tech and futuristic surveillance and military systems, with Israel using its technology in its genocide in Gaza.
MintPress News sheds light on the tech billionaire quietly pulling the strings in Washington, D.C.
Trump’s Billionaire Backer
Politics is an expensive business to be in. Thankfully for the Republican Party, they can rely on the support of Greg Brockman. Together with his wife, Anna, the OpenAI co-founder donated $25 million to MAGA Inc. – a super PAC funding President Trump and his allies.
MAGA Inc. relies almost entirely on billionaires like Brockman for its money. Sixty-two percent of the $305 million it raised came from donors pledging $5 million or more, and 96% from pledges over $1 million.
The figure of $305 million is completely unprecedented, dwarfing all previous records for a president’s super PAC. This, despite the fact Trump is legally barred from running for president again. Nevertheless, during his time in office, he has ignored so many laws and protocols that many are predicting he will attempt to do so regardless.
The decision to bankroll Trump’s political ambitions has provoked alarm among many employees of OpenAI – the company that launched A.I. chatbot, ChatGPT. Some have suggested that Brockman’s contributions go beyond merely quid pro quo political lobbying and represent an effort to change the course of the country.
A.I. PAC
Brockman himself has claimed that he is not political. His largest previous donation was $5,400 to Hillary Clinton back in 2016 – a paltry sum for someone worth an estimated $25.5 billion. Yet this new Trump contribution is part of a wider wave of influence, as the billionaire enters the political sphere in order to advance his own interests, and those of OpenAI.
The Brockmans have also sunk $50 million into Leading the Future, a bipartisan super PAC aimed at promoting the adoption of A.I. into a wide variety of sectors, and attacking and unseating skeptical legislators calling for increased regulation of the industry.
“This mission, in my mind, is bigger than companies, bigger than corporate structures,” he told WIRED Magazine, adding, “We are embarking on a journey to develop this technology that’s going to be the most impactful thing humanity has ever created. Getting that right and making that benefit everyone, that’s the most important thing.”
The public, however, are deeply skeptical. A recent poll found that public confidence in A.I. is very low – and falling. Only 5% of Americans say they trust A.I. a lot, and 77% worrying that the technology could represent a fundamental threat to humanity.
Many politicians agree, and wish to get a hold on the technology before it is too late. Yet the A.I. Industry is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars, making the likes of Brockman and co-founder Sam Altman some of the richest people on the planet. The worry is that the A.I. Industry will find its newfound wealth to lobby hard against legislation that would limit its growth, spending millions to crush anti-A.I. lawmakers.
To this end, they already have a model to follow in AIPAC. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee floods money into races involving candidates critical of Israel in an effort to cajole and coerce U.S. politicians into supporting Israel.
Earlier this month, Representative Thomas Massie – a fierce critic of Israel and the war on Iran – lost his Kentucky primary, after AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups spent tens of millions of dollars attacking him and funding his opponent, Ed Gallrein.
Massie’s Kentucky primary was the most expensive in U.S. history. The second- and third-costliest primary races in history also featured AIPAC successfully defeating Israel critics, Jamal Bowman and Cori Bush.
If many in the tech world have their way, unqualified support for A.I. could become the default position like championing Israel, with lawmakers wary of taking on the industry, lest they lose their seats. They certainly have the money to create an A.I. PAC of sorts; OpenAI alone is already valued at some $852 billion.
Using A.I. To Crack Down on Anti-A.I. Dissent
President Trump is already moving to block moves to regulate the industry. In December, he signed an executive order preventing states from passing their own laws limiting A.I., something that 38 states had already done.
The reasons for the decision were not clear. Trump himself stated that the plan was to have “one central source of approval.” But his A.I. czar, David Sacks, said that it represented an attempt to push back against many states’ “onerous” rules, and to help the U.S. compete with China.
Trump himself is personally invested in A.I., having bought stocks in Nvidia, AMD, CoreWeave, KLA Corp., and other industry stocks, even while deciding the laws around how it will be allowed to develop.
Perhaps more worryingly, new documents show that the Trump administration is planning to use the power of the national security state to crack down on what it calls a new wave of “anti-tech extremism.”
More than 1,000 pages of leaked government documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are anticipating a wave of domestic upheaval, as A.I. destroys communities across the country. Automation-related job losses and the building of gigantic data centers will remove water and electricity from public use, ramping up the price of what little remains.
As one report notes:
“The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent A.I. technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City.”
Thus, the government has already begun to surveil a new and extremely broad category of Americans. Ironically, they will be using A.I. to do so, monitoring individuals’ output on social media, messages, location data, and more.
Israeli “Talent” Driving OpenAI
In doing so, the U.S. government will be relying on tactics and technology honed by Israel in its surveillance of Palestine. Brockman and OpenAI are intimately familiar with this matter. In fact, both have deep connections to the Israeli national security state.
Brockman has previously stated that OpenAI runs on Israeli “talent.” The most prominent of these is company co-founder and former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. A Soviet-born Israeli, Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024 to found Safe Superintelligence, a new Tel Aviv-based A.I. company that will “prioritize safety and Israel’s role,” specifically recruiting Israelis to the firm.
While he tries to avoid making overtly political statements, Brockman has been publicly enthusiastic about Israel. “We have a number of Israeli engineers, scientists, and managers. They are top-notch, no question,” he said,
“We have a manager who runs one of our core teams who is ex-special forces, and there is nothing that phases him, so I think that there is something about the Israeli way that I think is actually very conducive to this field.”
He made those comments on stage at a 2023 event with Benjamin Netanyahu, who responded:
“You know what A.I. stands for? It stands for America and Israel.” The Israeli prime minister also stated that, in this field, Israel punches above its weight because it has “this feed of military A.I. that moves very fast and takes a very large part of the population.”
A few months earlier, Altman traveled to Israel to meet the country’s president, Isaac Herzog. There, Altman proclaimed that Israel will have a “huge role” in the future of A.I. He has also put his money where his mouth is, investing heavily in Apex, an Israeli A.I. startup founded by former members of Unit 8200, the IDF’s most elite spying and cyberwarfare division.
A.I.-Powered Genocide
Unit 8200 has been the centerpiece of Israel’s hi-tech onslaught on its neighbors. The group used the power of A.I. to sift through vast quantities of data it stores on Palestinians under their control in order to generate kill lists for its automated weapons systems. It was A.I. that enabled them to get around the bottlenecks of human targeting and unleash the full force of their arsenal on the civilian population of Gaza, killing tens of thousands in the first weeks of the attack alone.
An investigation by the Associated Press found that the Israeli military’s use of Microsoft and OpenAI artificial intelligence increased by nearly 200 times, or 20,000%, compared with the week preceding the October 7 assault.
OpenAI states that it has no partnership with the Israeli Defense Forces. Yet in January 2024 – at the height of the Israeli attack on Gaza – it quietly removed language in its terms of service prohibiting clients from using its models for “activity that has high risk of physical harm,” such as “military and warfare.”
Just days later, news broke that the corporation was working with the Department of War on a number of projects, including cybersecurity programs.
From there, the floodgates were opened, and OpenAI became a fully-fledged defense contractor. Last year, it bid for and won a $200 million U.S. military contract to “develop prototype frontier A.I. capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.” And in March, it came to a mysterious agreement with the Department of War to deploy A.I. systems in “classified environments.”
This news was particularly controversial, as OpenAI rival Anthropic had previously pulled out of the same deal. It stated that it had grave ethical concerns that the Department of War would immediately use the technology to carry out mass domestic surveillance in the United States and to build fully autonomous weapons systems that would function without any human input or oversight, whatsoever.
“We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic – a company hardly known for their moral stances – wrote on its blog, explaining their decision.
OpenAI has also announced a partnership with Anduril Industries, a U.S. based firm specializing in advanced military systems. Anduril founder, Palmer Luckey, who describes himself as a “radical Zionist,” is actively trying to work closely with Israeli security forces, travelling to Israel in February to meet with Netanyahu and senior military officials.
This convergence of Silicon Valley, Israel, and the national security state is a feature of even the largest and most well-established companies. Microsoft – a major funder of OpenAI – is a key player in the genocide in Palestine. It supplies the servers and technology to Unit 8200 to allow the group to store, surveil and analyze at least 13.6 petabytes of information (equivalent to 23,000 years of audio, or seven trillion pages of text) that it holds on Palestinians. For this, they are handsomely rewarded; the military industry is among the most lucrative fields to be a part of.
Getting ChatGPT To Be More Pro-Israel
There is also money to be made by gaming A.I. chatbots like ChatGPT to be more Zionist. The government of Israel has spent millions contracting American companies to deluge audiences with pro-Israel messaging.
A $6 million contract with U.S. firm, Clock Tower X, for example, notes that the company will create and promote pro-Israel websites designed to influence A.I. platforms like Claude and ChatGPT into parroting the official Israeli line, especially when it comes to questions about the Middle East.
And on Thursday, it was revealed that an enterprise run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale had directed $13 million of Israeli government money to firms dedicated to creating content specifically designed to influence ChatGPT into taking more pro-Israel positions.
This is just a fraction of the enormous $730 million public diplomacy budget Tel Aviv approved in March – a nearly fivefold jump from last year, and 100 times the amount it was spending before October 7, 2023.
Ultimately, then, the case of Greg Brockman and OpenAI highlights the growing connections between Silicon Valley, Israel, and the national security state. The billionaire is a new and important figure in domestic politics, bankrolling the Trump administration’s ambitions, while simultaneously flooding the country with money, supporting lawmakers that will promote his company’s interests, and ensuring widespread public opposition to A.I. does not find its voice in Washington, D.C.
OpenAI is increasingly becoming a military contractor, as 21st century battlefields become progressively automated. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Israel’s attack on Palestine. Indeed, many of the invasive surveillance tactics pioneered by Israel are being brought home to crush rising dissent. Brockman and OpenAI sit at the center of this, quietly planning the future of American society. A.I. itself might not be conscious, but Brockman certainly is.
Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. He completed his PhD in 2017 and has since authored two acclaimed books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams. Follow Alan on Twitter for more of his work and commentary: @AlanRMacLeod.
