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A quarter of the 13,000 federal lobbyists in Washington are involved in A.I. issues, up from 11 percent in 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/ai-lobbying-washington-openai-anthropic.html
It's a little hard to buy that 11% of federal lobbyists in DC were AI-related the year GPT-4 released.
We flagged lobbying as related to AI issues if the disclosures mentioned at least one of the following items: 1) artificial intelligence, 2) autonomous vehicles and systems and/or 3) data centers. We also searched for variations of those words (A.I.) as well as a handful of other AI terms including large language model and facial recognition.
Ah. It was just a hit match and everyone started putting the word AI everywhere in 2023.