Since last year, a pro-AI super PAC has paid Lantern Production Consultants LLC roughly $20 million for polling, digital ads, research and strategy work. Yet the only trace of the firm anyone has found is a post office box.
That box sits in the Spanish Springs shopping center in Sparks, Nevada, where the tenants include a Vietnamese restaurant, a hearing aid supplier and a Spirit Halloween. According to the paperwork, it is also where a consulting agency doing big business ahead of November’s midterm elections is based.
Federal campaign finance records show the payments come from Think Big, one of a network of pro-AI super PACs funded by the Leading the Future PAC. Lantern is not the only strange payee. Four Nevada LLCs have received money from super PACs in the Leading the Future network, and none of them looks much like a functioning business.
A mail center, a Staples and a chiropractor
American Mission, another super PAC in the network, paid Summit Ridge Media Group LLC about $13 million between December 2025 and September 2026. The company’s listed address belongs to a mail center in a Reno strip mall.
Blue Horizon Compliance Consultants, another name in the filings, lists its address as a Staples store in Reno. Prusik Partners LLC gives a strip mall in Henderson, Nevada, as its location, sharing the building with a beauty salon and a chiropractor.
The network funding these companies is based in Nevada too. It has raised more than $140 million to sway midterm races in line with the AI industry’s priorities. With major AI investors behind it, Leading the Future has become a leading backer of candidates who support what it describes as “an AI innovation policy agenda.”
Watchdogs call them shells
According to election watchdogs, the LLCs are shell companies set up to conceal the strategists, consultants and production firms that work with Leading the Future.
“This is about hiding where the money is going,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.
The Campaign Legal Center brought a complaint in May before the FEC, the agency responsible for enforcing campaign finance law. The group’s lawyers alleged that Think Big and American Mission broke the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) by not disclosing who actually received their payments. According to the complaint, the LLCs “function as mere extensions of the super PACs they serve.”
Leading the Future’s response was to blame a rival. “We comply with all applicable laws and this is merely a desperate ploy for attention from Public First, Anthropic, and the groups aligned with their outside organizations who see our message resonating with the public and policymakers,” spokesperson Jesse Hunt said in a statement sent by email.
Public First is a pro-AI super PAC that focuses on transparency and safeguards, and Anthropic leadership provides much of its funding. It denied the charge outright. “I have no idea what they’re talking about,” said Public First spokesperson Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez. “We unequivocally had nothing to do with this complaint.” Anthropic did not reply when asked for comment.
The referee can’t call fouls right now
A ruling before the midterms is unlikely, and probably not for some time afterward either.
The FEC has six commissioner seats, and the president appoints every one of them. Deciding a legal complaint takes a quorum of four commissioners, and the agency has not had one since May 2025. Given that situation, the Campaign Legal Center does not expect a hearing on the case any time soon.
Meanwhile, Think Big and American Mission are still sending millions of dollars to the Nevada LLCs.
Playing both sides makes the hidden vendors stranger
Two things make Leading the Future stand out. First, it has more money than any other pro-AI group, thanks to Silicon Valley backers such as billionaire Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman. Second, it bankrolls super PACs on both sides of the aisle. Think Big funds Democrats almost exclusively, while American Mission funds Republicans.
Because the operation is bipartisan, experts are left guessing why it spends so much on hidden vendors. Political strategists and consultants usually work for one party, not both.
Kyle Morse, deputy executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit advocacy group that criticizes big tech, sketched one possibility. “If you’re running in a Democrat primary and Think Big comes to spend in your race, and they drop half a million on your congressional district doing positive ads while using Republican vendors and strategists,” Morse said, that would make news.
Hiding vendors isn’t always a sign of bad intent. Some firms may just not want their name publicly attached to a pro-AI campaign. Still, with the FEC lacking a quorum for the foreseeable future, “We are not fundamentally equipped to figure out what’s happening here,” Morse said.
A pattern beyond AI money
Other groups besides Leading the Future have been accused of running spending through shells. Earlier this year, the Campaign Legal Center filed an FEC complaint against Brandon Herrera, a pro-gun YouTuber running for Congress in Texas District 23. The complaint said more than 99 percent of his campaign’s disbursements passed through Texas Strategy Group, which it claimed was “being used as a shell entity.”
Herrera’s campaign sent questions to conservative personality Matt Braynard, who runs Texas Strategy Group. Braynard firmly denied the allegations, calling the complaint “meritless” and “little more than a recycled legal theory from a partisan advocacy group.”
The watchdog also filed a complaint against Lead Left PAC, a pop-up super PAC funded by Republican operatives that presented itself as a Democratic group, presumably to interfere in Democratic primaries. The Campaign Legal Center accused it of paying shell companies so it would not be connected to Republican strategists.
According to Ports, the tactic piles more opacity onto an era already dominated by dark money. “There’s no way of tracing the source behind the money, and that’s bad enough on its own,” Ports said. “Now there’s this new component, where groups are playing games to hide where the money is being spent. As a result, voters really lack fundamental information about where the money is coming from and where it’s going.”
So if a pro-AI ad airs in your district this fall, the paper trail could stop at a PO box next to a Spirit Halloween in Sparks.