Nvidia Leads AI Companies in Federal Lobbying Spending as Anthropic and OpenAI Climb
Nvidia spent $2.2 million on federal lobbying in the July-September quarter, its highest-spending lobbying quarter, according to The Verge, which reported the figures on October 22, 2026. Anthropic spent $2.1 million in the same period, also its highest-spending quarter. OpenAI spent $1.5 million. Nvidia therefore led the three companies, with Anthropic second and OpenAI third.
The Nvidia figure appears in the company's quarterly filing under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), which is publicly available on lda.gov. Quarterly LD-2 reports list lobbying expenses for each registrant and cover the calendar quarter in question. The totals show what a company reports as spent. They do not break down the issues, bills or agencies involved.
The July-September figures follow a strong second quarter. CNBC reported on July 21, 2026 that OpenAI and Anthropic together spent $3.17 million on federal lobbying in the second quarter, up 23% from the first quarter and a record for the two firms combined. Anthropic's own second-quarter total was $1.97 million, its highest quarterly total since it began lobbying in March 2024, according to Yahoo Finance reporting from July 27. Its third-quarter figure of $2.1 million sits above that level, so its quarterly spending has kept rising.
Annual totals tell a somewhat different story. OpenSecrets lists NVIDIA Corp's 2026 reported lobbying total at $2,540,000 and OpenAI's at $2,220,000.
The broader context here is that these figures measure how much the companies pay to engage with Washington, not what that engagement achieves.
In my view, the more useful reading for practitioners is structural. Three companies whose products rest on accelerated compute (chips built for massively parallel processing) and frontier models (the largest, most capable AI systems) now file policy spending in the same disclosure system as older industrial lobbies, and they file it every quarter. That makes the trajectory visible. The next round of filings will show whether the second- and third-quarter increases hold, and whether the timing of spending lines up with the regulatory questions each company says matter most to its work.
