Anthropic donated $20 million to Public First Action[1], a PAC that promotes Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn and her sponsored Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)[2], a bill that will force everyone to scan their faces and IDs to use the internet under the guise of saving the children.
The legislative angle taken by companies like Anthropic is that they will provide the censorship gatekeeping infrastructure to scan all user-generated content that gets posted online for "appropriateness", guaranteeing AI providers a constant firehose of novel content they can train on and get paid for the free training. AI companies will also get paid to train on videos of everyone's faces and IDs.
As for why Blackburn supports KOSA[3]:
> Asked what conservatives’ top priorities should be right now, Senator Blackburn answered, “protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence.” She then talked about how KOSA could address this problem, and named social media platforms as places “where children are being indoctrinated.”
If Anthropic, the PACs it supports and Blackburn get their way with KOSA, the end result will be that anything posted on the internet will be able to be traced back to you. Web platforms will finally be able to sell their userbases as identifiable and monetizable humans to their partners/advertisers/governments/facial recognition systems/etc. AI companies will legally enshrine themselves as the official gatekeepers and censors of the internet, and they will be paid to train on the totality of novel human creativity in real-time.
That will be their moat.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/anthropic-gives-20-million-t...
[2] https://publicfirstaction.us/news/public-first-action-and-de...
[3] https://www.them.us/story/kosa-senator-blackburn-censor-tran...