Artificial intelligence is brought to you by these Florida lobbyists and political associations

Artificial intelligence might one day replace humanity, lead us to a post-scarcity utopia, or just turn into a more annoying version of Clippy. And who knows, maybe Clippy will get a high-tech comeback with access to nuclear launch codes.

For now, though, AI still needs lobbyists.

And Florida’s political scene is already full of them.

Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and xAI are all shaping the global AI race. They have quietly built strong teams in Tallahassee as lawmakers deal with procurement rules, datacenter growth, education policy, energy needs, and even the question of whether machines might one day see humans as unnecessary middle managers.

OpenAI — the company that launched a thousand panicked LinkedIn posts and at least three divorces via ChatGPT — is represented in Florida by The Advocacy Partners’ Sarah Suskey and Slater Bayliss, alongside The Southern Group team of Brian Bautista, Brian McManus, Chris Dudley, and Clark Smith.

Anthropic, which created Claude and is known for its strong focus on AI safety, has hired Capital City Consulting. Their team includes co-founder Nick Iarossi, Caroline Frasier, Chris Schoonover, and Kaley Flynn.

Then there’s Elon Musk’s xAI, which made Grok and shows that every billionaire eventually wants a chatbot based on their own online posts. Add in Tesla, and Musk is now closer than anyone to creating a real-life Knight Rider universe. Hopefully, the result is more like KITT or Red Dwarf’s Holly, and less like HAL 9000 on a wild streak.

In Florida, xAI is represented by Jeff Sharkey of Capitol Alliance Group, along with Taylor Biehl, who have both worked with Musk’s companies for a long time.

Naturally, the hyperscalers arrived too.

Google — inventor of the transformer architecture that made the current AI boom possible and owner of enough of the internet to make William Gibson retroactively uncomfortable — fields one of the deepest Tallahassee benches in the game.

That roster includes in-house advocates Amanda Ball, Joseph Dooley, Leah Popoff, and Taylor Ferguson, alongside Claudia Davant of Adams St. Advocates, Chris Moya of Jones Walker, Cissy Proctor of LSN Partners and Bill Rubin and Heather Turnbull of Rubin Turnbull & Associates.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has handled the AI era much like Rome handled its neighbors. If taking over completely is tough, forming a strategic partnership is just as good.

Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI has made Copilot one of the most widely used (and sometimes disliked) AI products in the world. Meanwhile, Azure now hosts a huge share of global AI computing power.

In Florida, Microsoft works with Lisa Aaron Consulting, Metz Husband & Daughton, and SBM Partners. Together, their team is so large that even Cortana might feel left out.

Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and the Llama AI models, has also built a strong presence in the Capitol by hiring Ballard Partners and the always top-ranked GrayRobinson.

Their team features Brian Ballard, the top national lobbyist, along with Adrian Lukis and Scott Wagner at Ballard Partners. At GrayRobinson, former Speaker and firm President Dean Cannon, Jason Unger, and Joseph Salzverg are on board. In-house advocate Theresa Robertson is also part of the group.

And yes, Apple is here too.

The Cupertino giant’s AI rollout has occasionally felt less like the launch of a revolutionary platform and more like watching the world’s richest company repeatedly insist Siri is about to cook any day now. However, Apple Intelligence still places the company squarely in the middle of the modern AI race.

Apple’s team in Tallahassee works with The Southern Group, including founding partner Paul Mitchell, Bautista, Dudley, Rachel Cone, Erin Rock, Nicole Kelly, Smith, and enough other lobbyists to fill a strong SEC defensive lineup.

Of course, none of this computing comes cheap.

The AI boom has started a race for datacenters, electricity, and cooling systems. This demand is so big that utility companies have become key players in the future of AI.

Florida Power & Light, Duke Energy, and TECO all maintain massive lobbying presences in Tallahassee as lawmakers debate datacenter siting, energy load growth and infrastructure expansion tied to hyperscale development.

In short, the future of AI might depend on GPUs, but it still needs people to sign off on new substations.

There’s also a related trend: prediction markets. Long before ChatGPT, Claude, or Kalshi, Isaac Asimov imagined Multivac, a supercomputer so advanced it could predict election results by interviewing just one randomly chosen American voter.

Seventy years later, Silicon Valley saw that idea and decided to turn it into a business.

Kalshi — the federally regulated prediction-market platform now involved in several legal and regulatory battles over event contracts — is represented in Florida by Capital City Consulting.

Sportsbooks and fantasy sports companies have also built up their teams.

DraftKings retained McGuireWoods Consulting, SBM Partners and Technology Advocates. FanDuel and BetMGM both retained Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. PrizePicks brought in Capital City Consulting, Oak Strategies and Rubin Turnbull & Associates.

Even Seminole Hard Rock Digital, the Seminole Tribe’s online gaming division, works with Ballard Partners and PooleMcKinley.

Naturally, pop culture has been warning us about these issues for decades.

HAL 9000 calmly killed astronauts while saying everything was “completely operational.” Skynet started the apocalypse. SHODAN made a god complex into an operating system. GlaDOS turned workplace testing into psychological warfare.

But fiction also gave us helpful AI characters like Data, Baymax, WALL-E, KITT, and the Star Trek tradition of robots who just wanted to help people be a little better.

Interestingly, many of those positive AI stories are now owned by Disney, thanks to its many acquisitions over the past twenty years. The company has enough AI-themed stories to create a whole ‘please don’t fear the machines’ movie universe.

No one really knows what the future of AI will look like. For now, Tallahassee’s lobbyists will keep helping big industries work with the government, while lawmakers try to figure out if they’re shaping the future, chasing it, or just feeding it more paperwork.

And if the machines ever do become self-aware, at least they’ll know exactly who to hire at the Capitol.