Cite as: Abeba Birhane, Riccardo Angius, William Agnew, Harshvardhan J. Pandit, Bhaskar Mitra, Roel Dobbe, and Zeerak Talat. 2026. Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity. In The 2026 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’26), June 25–28, 2026, Montreal, QC, Canada. ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 111, 22 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3805689.3806740
A preprint can be accessed at: https://hdl.handle.net/2262/112901
Big AI’s control of narrative and regulation poses significant threat to rule of law
Our work pinpoints the growing threat posed by the influence AI companies have over the rule of law, and people’s lives, as well as outlining how society can stem the tide. We mapped the growing and outsized influence that the “Big AI” industry exerts on the capture and control of the narrative, and of the regulatory measures related to AI and its ever-growing use in society. After taking a deep dive into literature and media reports, we identified 27 established patterns of “corporate capture”, a process by which regulation and public bodies come to act in the interest of corporations rather than people. Applying this classification to a dataset of 100 articles, specifically published around four critical events between 2023 and 2025 (the EU AI Act trilogues and the global AI summits in the UK, South Korea and France), we found 249 cases fitting capture patterns.
Of these instances, the most prevalent relate to:
- Narrative capture, dominated by narratives such as “regulation stifles innovation” and “red tape” whereby regulation is portrayed as unnecessary, excessive, or obsolete; and
- Elusion of law, pertaining to violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws.
How does Big AI exert such influence?
Growing evidence, outlined in the research, suggests that Big AI has undermined and resisted regulation, oversight and enforcement in a variety of ways, such as lobbying; retaliated against whistleblowers, researchers and law-makers; and benefited in some cases from a “revolving door” model where former policymakers go on to advise or take employment with major AI companies. There are also many examples of Big AI making significant donations to political parties, public officials owning equity in regulated companies, while some governments and political leaders have also set the stage to undermine existing rules. For example, after previously calling for “simplification”, in October 2025 EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen explicitly advocated for deregulation.
What is the potential impact of this research?
Over the past decade, the AI industry has come to exert an unprecedented economic, political and societal power and influence. And that continues to grow. Our work: 1) provides a new framework for understanding and identifying the many different ways in which Big AI controls the narrative and influences associated regulatory measures; and 2) categorises the most prevalent mechanisms in which the industry does that.
What can we learn from other industries?
Our paper highlights lessons to be learned from adjacent movements in similar industries such as Big Tobacco, Pharma and Oil on some of the tactics used to prevent capture. These include calls for separation between public and private interests and binding rules for government-industry interactions to manage conflicts-of-interests. Transferable lessons from climate justice advocacy can be applied to inform public opinion and improve media representation through coalition-building, litigation and public pressure on regulators. We also put forward intervention points for resistance and existing efforts that promote alternative regulatory interests and counter narratives particularly from civil society organisations, independent investigative journalism, independent audits of the AI technologies, and efforts that centre labour movements and marginalised communities.