Is this OpenAI’s anonymous Twitter sockpuppet account?

Earlier this year, an anonymous Twitter account started making inflammatory and misleading claims about The Midas Project.

The operators of the account have not done a great job of covering their tracks, however, and a combination of technical and behavioral evidence indicates the account is very likely connected to OpenAI’s super PAC, Leading The Future. 

Our organization wasn’t the only target — the account, anonymous but operating under the handle “Doomer Daylight,” goes after a rotating cast of nonprofits, researchers, and journalists, accusing them of being part of a well-funded “doomer network" with ties to OpenAI’s competitors.

That last part is interesting. They aren’t broadly pro-industry, like many on the platform who criticize AI safety advocates. Instead, wherever possible, they defend OpenAI while taking shots at OpenAI competitor Anthropic. For example, last week, when the SF Standard published an investigation into OpenAI's astroturfed child safety coalition, @DoomerDaylight rushed to OpenAI's defense and accused certain organizations (which, interestingly, were not named in the initial reporting) of being funded by Anthropic to “keep everyone else in check” and “maintain control.” 

In its few months of posting, the Doomer Daylight account hasn’t earned many followers or organic reach. In light of this, they’ve occasionally turned to paid advertising, promoting certain tweets to reach hundreds of thousands of users.

After looking into the account, I can now report where it appears to come from: OpenAI’s convoluted and obfuscated anti-regulatory political machine. Specifically, the account has apparent connections to Targeted Victory and Build American AI — organizations affiliated with Leading The Future, the super PAC fighting AI regulation funded by OpenAI affiliates, and assembled under the guidance of OpenAI's chief political operative Chris Lehane. The evidence linking OpenAI to this account is circumstantial but extensive. If this is what it looks like, OpenAI’s super PAC is not just spending millions on misleading attack ads, but is also running anonymous social media campaigns to directly attack the nonprofits and journalists who criticize them.

Playing dirty to discredit nonprofit critics would not be entirely out of character for OpenAI. Last fall, the company served wide-ranging subpoenas to at least seven nonprofit organizations critical of its restructuring, including The Midas Project (perhaps they were unhappy with our previous advocacy concerning the company). Public Citizen's co-president Robert Weissman called the subpoenas an attempt to "bully nonprofit critics" and "chill speech." Running anonymous accounts to pester those same nonprofits with false accusations would be a continuation of that pattern by other means.

Before getting to the evidence that led us to connect this anonymous account to OpenAI, it helps to understand the full scope of the political operation that @DoomerDaylight appears to be part of.

Background on Leading The Future

Launched late last year, Leading The Future is an AI industry super PAC that has already raised $125 million with the goal of punishing candidates who have supported AI regulation. Its two largest donors are OpenAI affiliates: Greg and Anna Brockman, the President of OpenAI and his wife, gave $25 million. Another $25 million was given by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of the venture capital firm a16z, which has invested in OpenAI, including co-leading its most recent $122 billion funding round.

But beyond its funding, the PAC is, in my assessment, the brainchild of OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane. Lehane is an opposition researcher and consultant who is known for playing hardball to help high-profile clients achieve their political goals. For the past few years, he’s taken a role as OpenAI’s top policy lead — and he is the person who, more than anyone else, appears to have designed the political infrastructure of Leading The Future. 

Two former OpenAI employees attributed Brockman's donations to Lehane's influence, with one telling The Information: "This has Chris written all over it,” and another saying he "provides informal advice" to the PAC’s staffers. The Wall Street Journal reported that Lehane was "involved in initial conversations" about the need for the PAC. The PAC is explicitly modeled after Fairshake, the crypto industry's super PAC, which was itself Lehane's invention. Leading The Future copies Fairshake's structure and strategy almost exactly. Its goal is to punish candidates who support regulation of the industry, and it is composed of a main super PAC, two partisan affiliates for Democratic and Republican primaries (Think Big and American Mission, respectively), and a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm, Build American AI, which is focused on creating the impression of grassroots support. Josh Vlasto, a key figure at Fairshake during the 2024 cycle, co-leads Leading The Future.

The PAC's behavior so far has been aggressive, employing misleading messaging and tactics many would describe as astroturfing. The firm at the center of the operation is Targeted Victory, one of the largest Republican digital consulting firms in Washington. The connections between Leading The Future and Targeted Victory run deep. Targeted Victory’s CEO, Zac Moffatt, is Leading The Future's co-lead. The PAC's 501(c)(4) advocacy arm, Build American AI, is run by Nathan Leamer, Targeted Victory's former vice president of public affairs. Leamer is also linked to American Resolve, another 501(c)(4) that — as Transformer News documented — sent over 75% of its expenditures back to Targeted Victory.

If Leading The Future is paying Targeted Victory for digital consulting (the opaque financing and organizational structures make it impossible to track fully), it’s evidently not enough to buy top-tier operational security. It does not take too much effort to make a very convincing case that Targeted Victory is operating the anonymous Doomer Daylight on behalf of Leading The Future, and thus OpenAI.

Normally, I’d ignore an account like Doomer Daylight. Much of its content is extremely low-quality and clearly AI-generated. But it is throwing money at advertising for at least some of its posts, and we discovered that they’re planning to launch a full exposé-type website soon, so I decided it was best to shine some light on the operation.

The Digital Fingerprint of Targeted Victory

Targeted Victory is a GOP consulting juggernaut, but its strength lies in quantity, not quality. As one of the premier GOP marketing and communications consultancies, Targeted Victory spends enormous sums on political advertising, acting as an intermediary between clients and the platforms where ads run. Targeted Victory is, at its core, playing a numbers game for political candidates. 

The quantity-over-quality approach does make it easier for us to track their influence through the websites it has churned out for clients. If you Google distinctive phrases from the privacy policy on BuildAmericanAI.org, something interesting happens. Various related websites start surfacing — sites for right-wing political candidates and PACs — that use the same language in their privacy policies. These policies not only show a highly similar overall structure and identical boilerplate language, but also the same peculiar phrases and typos, like “Notice of Right to Opt-out of Sale and Sharing Personal Information and Targeting Advertising” (instead of “Targeted Advertising”) or “Our Services that collect personal information are not intended for children of age.”)  Most of these sites also use the same domain registrar (GoDaddy, which despite being the most popular registrar, only accounts for about 10-15% of all domains) and the same GoDaddy-affiliated LLC (Domains By Proxy, LLC) to obscure ownership in public WHOIS domain records. 

For example, consider johnsonfortennessee.com — the campaign site for a Tennessee Senate candidate whose Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show payments to Targeted Victory. The campaign website uses the same domain registrar/privacy provider as other Targeted Victory sites and has a privacy policy that overlaps with BuildAmericanAI.org perhaps more than any other.

Interestingly, the source code of the site also has a specific line of code — a timestamp with particular formatting — which indicates that it was built using the visual page builder Webflow, a somewhat niche platform that is only used by about 1% of all sites on the internet. 

Not all Targeted Victory sites use Webflow, but their Leading The Future-affiliated ones do: all four of LeadingTheFuture.com, BuildAmericanAI.org, ThinkBigPac.AI, and AmericanMission.com were built using Webflow in addition to sharing privacy policy language and domain registration through GoDaddy/Domains By Proxy.

This is a digital fingerprint created by having the same people reusing the same processes for generating privacy policies, registering domains, and hosting the website’s content.

Interestingly, there is an under-construction website, www.doomerdaylight.org, with the same shade of dark blue and a similar logo to the @DoomerDaylight Twitter account. The CSS file associated with this site confirms it will be used for similar advocacy, with sections labeled “Effective Altruism” and "Truth Squad," for what appears to be extended editorial content criticizing the AI safety community. Whoever is behind @DoomerDaylight appears to be building out the account's Twitter talking points into a platform hosting long-form content.

The site is still a preview page under construction, but its WHOIS record shows it was registered on Feb. 27, 2026, through GoDaddy with Domains By Proxy, LLC privacy protection. In addition, its HTML source code contains the Webflow signature:

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Meaning the site was built in the same niche visual page builder that was used for all four of the AI advocacy organizations affiliated with Leading The Future. 

All signs suggest that DoomerDaylight.org, much like BuildAmericanAI.org and LeadingTheFuture.com, is a Targeted Victory-built website. This alone isn’t enough to prove Doomer Daylight is a Leading The Future operation, but there’s behavioral evidence as well.

Doomer Daylight’s Posting Habits

The Doomer Daylight and Build American AI Twitter accounts also have suspiciously similar posting patterns and arguments. I analyzed virtually all of the public tweets on their accounts. The nearly 500 combined tweets reveal patterns consistent with a single operator switching between two accounts. Both post primarily, but not exclusively, on weekdays during U.S. Eastern time business hours, with the same distribution which peaks around midday and trails off into the evening. Both go nearly silent on Sundays.

The Doomer Daylight account frequently uses the same phrases and talking points as the Build American AI account, demanding critics “disclose your donors” and criticizing supporters of AI regulation as “doomers” or “effective altruists.”

The most striking example involves an article (parroting the same messaging) that was authored by journalist Jordan Schachtel and, soon after publication, retweeted by both the Doomer Daylight and Build American AI accounts within about a minute of each other, consistent with one admin logging out of account A and into account B for a quick retweet.

That article had been published only 20 minutes earlier. Schachtel is a figure with his own relevant history here. Recently, he has begun producing content attacking AI safety advocates that has been widely parroted by Leading The Future and its affiliates, as well as ideologically-aligned big names, including David Sacks and Marc Andreessen (a primary funder of Leading The Future). He’s claimed to be doing this independently, but he previously worked for another political advocacy group, The Israel Project, where he was recorded on a secret camera describing how the organization ran covert social media influence campaigns through accounts that concealed their connection to the lobbying operation. 

In the video, he describes his strategy: “We’re putting together a lot of pro-Israel media through various social media channels that aren’t The Israel Project’s channels. So we have a lot of side projects that we are trying to influence the public debate with. That’s why it’s a secretive thing, because we don’t want people to know that these side projects are associated with The Israel Project. … We have a team of 13 people. We are working on a lot of videos, explainers.” Now, he’s developed a newfound interest in writing articles attacking AI safety advocates, which are quickly retweeted by accounts affiliated with OpenAI’s super PAC, including the Doomer Daylight account.

I should emphasize that the Doomer Daylight account has not had much success in its three months of posting, receiving zero likes on most of its tweets, and only amassing around 70 followers. In light of this, and perhaps suggestive of big money behind the account, Doomer Daylight runs paid ads on Twitter, pushing views on certain posts into the hundreds of thousands. One post promoting a Jordan Schachtel article has accumulated nearly 1 million views — wildly out of line with the account's negligible organic reach. Whoever is behind @DoomerDaylight is spending real money to get these talking points in front of people.

So it sure looks like Targeted Victory is running a paid sockpuppet account. Does this appear to be a service they offer? One piece of evidence is the LinkedIn profile of Jay Burstein, a Manager on Targeted Victory's Corporate Team, who describes his work as "managing social media accounts and identifying rapid response opportunities” and “supporting PACs and corporations grow their online presence [sic], shape public perception, and advance their goals in a competitive digital landscape." 

His profile also says that he is "especially passionate about leveraging AI tools to enhance our creative output." At this point, I should also mention that Doomer Daylight is full of what would be best described as “AI slop.” 

Many of their threads contain the hallmarks of AI-generated text: negative parallelisms of the form “This isn’t just X but Y,” rhetorical stock phrases, rule-of-three lists spliced into its arguments, and declarations like "The pattern is clear.” It sometimes totally loses track of the argument, e.g., critiquing OpenAI’s use of aggressive subpoenas by making it sound like OpenAI was actually the recipient of said tactic. The account's operator, whoever they are, does not appear to be doing much editing before hitting "post."

Following The Money

So, recapping the case so far: Late last year, OpenAI’s president, its chief global affairs officer, and a major financial backer, a16z, all teamed up to create a super PAC opposing AI legislation. That super PAC works alongside a 501(c)(4) advocacy arm and has ties to Targeted Victory. Both of those firms share surprising connections with an anonymous sockpuppet account that attacks their ideological opponents in direct and misleading ways, in addition to running paid ads promoting its messages. 

Unfortunately, there’s no public trail of financial disclosures that establishes this connection. If Build American AI was paying Targeted Victory for services, including running the Doomer Daylight account, we wouldn’t see public evidence for it— 501(c)(4) organizations don’t have to disclose all of their expenditures quarterly in the way that PACs do. 

But what if Leading The Future was paying directly? As a PAC, they do need to disclose their spending. Interestingly, Targeted Victory — the firm whose CEO co-runs Leading The Future, whose former VP runs Leading The Future’s advocacy arm, and whose employees attest to managing social media for PACs — itself appears nowhere in Leading The Future's spending disclosures. 

According to FEC filings, Leading The Future has disbursed over $11 million. Of that, $500,000 went to Build American AI (one possible way that Targeted Victory is getting paid to work on the PAC’s behalf). Another $10 million went to the two partisan affiliate PACs — American Mission and Think Big — which have been spending millions on political attack ads. But roughly $385,000 went to a company called Prusik Partners LLC in Henderson, Nev., for services described as "management consulting," "website services," and "strategy consulting."

Prusik Partners has no web presence outside of these FEC filings. Henderson, Nev. is also the city listed in the privacy policies for both Build American AI and Leading The Future (websites that use the same tech stack as other Targeted Victory-linked sites). Prusik Partners appears to be a pass-through entity — a vehicle for routing payments to Targeted Victory or its affiliates without creating a direct paper trail.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not claiming. I have not seen a contract or email proving that Build American AI or Targeted Victory operate @DoomerDaylight on behalf of Leading The Future and thus OpenAI. What I have is a convergence of evidence: a website built on the same uncommon tech stack as a network of Targeted Victory clients; posting patterns consistent with a single operator managing two accounts during business hours; social media content that uses shared vocabulary, shared targets, and shared fabrications suggesting a common source; personnel at the firm whose job descriptions match the account's activity; paid ad spending pushing millions of views for articles supporting the PAC’s narrative; and a financial structure that appears designed to obscure the relationship between OpenAI and the operatives doing the work. Readers can weigh this evidence and draw their own conclusions.

But I want to return to the question of what kind of behavior this represents. Leading The Future has spent millions running attack ads that make no mention of AI against a state legislator who sponsored an AI safety bill. OpenAI served overly broad subpoenas to seven nonprofits that criticized it in a move widely seen as intended to stifle criticism. And now an anonymous Twitter account — apparently connected to the same political operation — is pestering those same nonprofits with accusations of astroturfing and malfeasance, while paying to push those claims to hundreds of thousands of people. This is not the behavior of a company that wants to engage in good faith with legitimate policy disagreements. It is the pattern of a company that wants to make its critics shut up, or as Chris Lehane once described his strategy, “punch them in the mouth.” 

If we’re wrong about this, and Leading The Future has no connection — on paper or in practice — to the Doomer Daylight account, we hope that they will correct us and explain some of these suspicious congruities. But that conversation should be had face-to-face, with both parties coming to the table honestly. They shouldn’t need a fake account to fight their battles for them.