This is a collaboration with The Lever*, a reader-supported investigative news outlet that holds accountable the people and corporations manipulating the levers of power.*
Max Rose, the pugnacious former Democratic congressman from Staten Island, has been a frequent guest on cable news this election cycle, touting the success in this year’s Democratic primaries of moderate candidates like Luke Bronin in Connecticut’s First Congressional District and Cait Conley in New York’s 17th District.
“These are each instances of phenomenal public servants, phenomenal records … It’s do you have new ideas? Are you willing to shake up the system?” said Rose, a self-described “old-school Democrat,” during a recent appearance on MS NOW.
These candidates have something else in common: They were lifted to success over progressive opponents with millions of dollars in spending from VoteVets, an influential veterans-focused political network where Rose serves as a top adviser. Rose, an Army veteran, joined the organization by 2024 after a stint in the private sector following his unsuccessful 2020 re-election bid.
Less well known, however, is Rose’s dual role as an operative for the artificial intelligence industry—a position never disclosed in his television appearances or in the op-ed pages where he pens defenses of Silicon Valley.
First reported by The New York Times in May, Rose has been an adviser to Leading the Future, a new organization launched in 2025 with the backing of AI executives to fend off industry regulation. The group’s top donors include OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the AI-focused venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz, and software giant Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Andreessen and Lonsdale are prominent supporters of President Donald Trump and contribute largely to Republican candidates.
“The revolving door between the Democratic establishment and corporate lobbies that are literally raising our utility bills and bankrolling Trump embodies the political corruption voters are fed up with,” said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for Justice Democrats, an advocacy group focused on electing progressive candidates. The Leading the Future network has raised a whopping $75 million and has deployed its financial firepower in both Democratic and Republican primaries to knock off candidates perceived as too adversarial to the tech industry, in favor of those promoting lighter-touch regulations.
Most notably, the PAC, through its affiliated Democratic spending arm, Think Big, spent nearly $8 million to defeat Alex Bores, a congressional candidate for New York’s 12th Congressional District, who sponsored AI safety legislation as a state lawmaker and made tech regulation a key plank of his campaign platform. In the race for Massachusetts’s open Sixth Congressional District seat, Think Big has dropped nearly $700,000 on television ads to back Dan Koh, a former Biden White House official.
The playbook is modeled on the cryptocurrency industry’s ground plan in recent election cycles, in which crypto-affiliated groups spent massive sums to defeat foes of their preferred policies. The most prominent example was the crypto PACs’ successful effort to oust former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) in 2024 by dropping $40 million on the race. In fact, Josh Vlasto, the head of Leading the Future, was the chief spokesperson for Fairshake, the crypto industry’s super PAC, and still serves as an adviser.
Rose is no stranger to such tech matters. As the chair of the House Counterterrorism Subcommittee in 2019, he oversaw certain AI policy issues related to national security and convened a hearing with tech executives focused on the use of AI by social media sites to take down terrorist content.
In the hearing, Rose expressed skepticism about the technology’s capabilities, at least in the realm of content moderation: “We’ve been approached by the social media companies with this libertarian, technocratic elitism that’s highly, highly disturbing and it centers around the claim that AI can accomplish everything.”
Now, as an adviser to Leading the Future, Rose has apparently shifted his views on the technology, warning lawmakers not to dismiss artificial intelligence’s potential:
“The last consumer tech generation optimized for clicks and attention,” Rose wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Reporter, a right-wing news outlet which did not disclose the author’s ties to the industry. “AI is being applied to problems we have actually wanted technology to solve.”
Leading the Future could also have tapped Rose to fortify the AI industry’s ties to the Democratic Party’s top brass, especially since in Rose’s role at VoteVets, he’s closely aligned with the party establishment.
VoteVets has amassed a $20 million war chest for political spending this cycle and has intervened in Democratic primaries, often alongside the spending vehicles affiliated with Democratic Party leadership. The group has donor and organizational ties to a new dark-money “party within the party” pushing Democrats to the “moderate” middle.
Another operative at VoteVets, Peter Kauffmann, also has industry ties, serving both as a vice chair at the PAC and as the lead spokesperson for an astroturf lobbying operation at the behest of Wall Street banks and credit card companies.
Under Rose’s watch, VoteVets and Leading the Future haven’t yet lined up on the same side in a Democratic race, but both organizations’ billionaire donors share financial interests.
Among VoteVets’ largest individual contributors this year is Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund executive whose portfolio is heavily invested in the build-out of data centers to power the AI boom. Several of VoteVets’ endorsed candidates have staked out middle-of-the-road positions on regulating artificial intelligence compared to their progressive counterparts.
VoteVets has only occasionally waded into AI policy issues, for instance opposing the use of “error-prone AI tools” at the Department of Veterans Affairs to make up for staff cuts under the Trump administration.
As an official at VoteVets, Rose has modified his antagonism toward the left. As a member of both the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus and the more conservative Blue Dog Coalition, Rose frequently sparred with the progressive “Squad” members of the House, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and in 2019 publicly challenged the “socialist” wing of the party to try to primary him.
This year, however, as Democratic primary voters have shifted left and moved against the party’s establishment, Rose has struck a different tone: “It’s not left vs. middle. It’s not progressive vs. moderate … that’s how we’re seeing the transformation of the Democratic Party,” said Rose on MS NOW.
“Just like voters now have to question whether spending from groups like EMILYs LIST or the Blue Dogs is actually just the Israel lobby using them as a pass-through, every voter is now forced to question whether VoteVets-backed candidates are also the choice of the pro-Trump AI lobby,” said Andrabi of Justice Democrats.
Neither Rose nor VoteVets responded to a request for comment from The Lever and the Prospect.