Top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, adding to the roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI regulation.

The new “rapid response cohort” of congressional AI fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The six rapid response fellows, including five with PhDs and two who held prior positions at big tech firms, operate from the offices of two of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s top three lieutenants on AI legislation — Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) — as well as the Senate Banking Committee and the offices of Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Alongside the Open Philanthropy fellows — and hundreds of outside-funded fellows throughout the government, including many with links to the tech industry — the six AI staffers in the industry-funded rapid response cohort are helping shape how key players in Congress approach the debate over when and how to regulate AI, at a time when many Americans are deeply skeptical of the industry.

The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI systems.

“Tech firms hold an unprecedented amount of financial capital and have a long track record of using it to attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor,” said Sarah Myers West, a former senior advisor on AI policy at the Federal Trade Commission and managing director at the AI Now Institute, a research nonprofit.

The companies involved stress that they don’t play roles in hiring; the nonprofits themselves pick the fellows. And some on Capitol Hill say industry-linked fellows are filling the vacuum caused by a precipitous decline in institutional tech knowledge.

When lawmakers began a push several years ago for rules that would rein in Silicon Valley, they found congressional tech expertise and funding for permanent policy staff had largely evaporated. Outside fellowship programs — many with ties to the tech industry — have emerged to fill that gap.

The trend has been supercharged by the recent AI frenzy on Capitol Hill. As Congress searches for staffers that can make sense of the fast-moving technology, new tech fellowships have sprouted across Washington.

“There’s been this brain drain that's occurred,” said Kevin Kosar, a researcher at the center-right American Enterprise Institute who specializes in congressional institutions. “Philanthropy is having to step in and help out.”

But the speed with which some of these programs developed — and the strong interest they’ve engendered in Silicon Valley — raise questions about whether they’re more akin to an industry lobbying campaign than a source of disinterested expertise.

AAAS is a Washington-based science nonprofit with a 50-year history of funding fellows to work on science and technology policy in Congress and at federal agencies.

But its new cohort of congressional AI fellows, conceived and launched in just two months, is covered with AI industry fingerprints.

Money from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia and IBM is partially funding the salaries of the AI fellows placed by AAAS in influential Senate offices this October — including those of Heinrich and Rounds, who already have Open Philanthropy fellows.

Spokespeople for Heinrich and Rounds did not respond to requests for comment.

The new AI fellowship was conceived and substantially coordinated by Craig Mundie, a former Microsoft executive who still advises CEO Satya Nadella and works on the........

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