The Alaska Story investigation: Another Anthropic connection, as Bill Hill taps Big AI money

By SUZANNE DOWNING

Aug. 12, 2026 — First it was Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, whose race for Alaska governor has been flooded with money from employees of the San Francisco artificial-intelligence company Anthropic.

Now an Anthropic employee has turned up among the major donors to Bill Hill, the nominally independent candidate being built into the Democrats’ challenger for Alaska’s seat in the US House.

A new Federal Election Commission filing shows Madeleine Thompson of San Francisco, identified as a computer programmer employed by Anthropic, contributed $3,500 to Bill Hill for Alaskans on Aug. 9.

The contribution was disclosed on a Form 6 report, which campaigns must file for donations of $1,000 or more received shortly before an election. Thompson’s donation was the largest of the five contributions listed on that report.

The contribution is much smaller than the extraordinary Anthropic money flowing to Kreiss-Tomkins, but it adds another thread connecting Alaska’s suddenly well-financed candidates of the left to the California artificial-intelligence industry.

Six Anthropic employees contributed a combined $372,000 to Kreiss-Tomkins’ gubernatorial campaign. Altogether, donors associated with artificial intelligence and technology contributed more than $521,000 to his campaign, according to an earlier Alaska Story analysis.

The San Francisco Treat: Six Anthropic employees pour historic money into one Alaska candidate’s race for governor

Hill’s Anthropic contribution is one more piece of a campaign finance structure that looks increasingly unusual for a candidate who entered the race in January with little statewide name recognition, no previous statewide political organization and no apparent base capable of generating the millions of dollars now being spent to introduce him to Alaska voters.

Hill lists himself as an independent. His campaign financing, consultants, endorsements, ActBlue fundraising platform and outside support, however, are increasingly indistinguishable from those of a Democrat.

His own campaign website gives donors the option of contributing through ActBlue, the national fundraising platform that serves Democratic candidates and leftist organizations. ActBlue’s prominent use is one of the clearest indications of the national political infrastructure supporting his campaign.

Hill has also received the endorsements of Democratic and progressive organizations, labor unions and far-left Democrat Matt Schultz, who suspended his own campaign for the House and endorsed Hill. As the Democratic field consolidated, Hill became the left’s principal challenger to Republican Congressman Nick Begich.

The money followed.

FEC records show Hill’s campaign raised $1,336,292 through July 29. Of that, $1,264,611 came from individuals, including $1,030,946 in itemized contributions. The campaign spent $820,406 and reported $515,886 in cash on hand, with no candidate loans and no debts.

Hill did not contribute or loan his campaign any money.

An analysis of approximately $916,000 in itemized contributions for which a donor’s state could be identified found that only about $221,000 — roughly 24% — came from Alaska. Approximately $695,000, or 76%, came from outside the state.

California donors accounted for about $217,000, nearly as much as all Alaska donors combined. New York contributed approximately $142,000, with additional large sums arriving from Massachusetts, Maryland, Washington ,and other states.

Hill’s high-dollar donors include progressive investors and financiers such as Dirk Ziff and Michael Novogratz. His campaign has also received contributions from End Citizens United and the Working Class Heroes Fund, a hybrid political action committee associated with Nebraska’s Dan Osborn.

Hill emphasizes that he does not accept corporate PAC money and promotes his contributions from residents of more than 60 Alaska communities. But that branding leaves out the larger financial picture: Most of the identifiable money supporting his campaign has come from outside Alaska, while a Washington, DC-based super PAC is spending even more on his behalf than Hill has raised himself.

Wheel Dog PAC had reported approximately $2.17 million in independent expenditures supporting Hill through July 29. No comparable independent spending operation has emerged to oppose him.

Wheel Dog has paid for nearly every expensive component of a statewide campaign: glossy mailers, television and radio advertising, digital advertising, production, text messages and voter-contact operations. Its spending included approximately $784,000 for mail, a television buy of nearly $227,000 and a digital advertising purchase of approximately $163,000.

Two Wheel Dog mail campaigns reported July 27 and 28 alone cost nearly $175,000.

Alaska Story Investigation: The progressive dark-money pipeline fueling radical candidate Bill Hill

The funding behind Wheel Dog is even more opaque.

As The Alaska Story previously reported, Wheel Dog received $400,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a major progressive dark-money organization historically associated with the Arabella Advisors network.

It also received $300,000 from Contours Inc. and $250,000 from the Global Impact Social Welfare Fund, known as GISWF.

Those organizations are entangled financially. GISWF’s federal tax filing for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, disclosed a $6.62 million grant to Contours for vaguely described “program support.” The Sixteen Thirty Fund has also given more than $2.3 million to GISWF over time, while GISWF reported granting $625,000 back to Sixteen Thirty during its most recent fiscal year.

The money circulates through a network of interconnected nonprofits before emerging as political spending in Alaska, making the original donors difficult or impossible for voters to identify.

Wheel Dog is legally prohibited from coordinating its spending with Hill’s campaign. Practically, however, it is providing the statewide advertising and voter-contact machinery that a little-known candidate would ordinarily have to build and finance for himself.

Hill presents himself as an Alaska independent standing against billionaires and special interests. Yet his campaign is being powered by ActBlue, national progressive donors, California money, left-wing political organizations and more than $2 million in outside spending financed through a dark-money network.

The arrival of an Anthropic employee among Hill’s major donors adds another curious similarity between his campaign and the Kreiss-Tomkins operation.

One Anthropic contribution does not establish an organized company effort, and the donations attributed to Anthropic employees are personal contributions rather than corporate donations. But Alaska voters are now seeing the same pattern in two races: candidates of the left, each packaged as something politically broader, drawing disproportionate financial help from wealthy national networks with strong ties to California and the technology industry.

For a political “independent,” Bill Hill certainly has a lot of Democratic money and Democratic machinery working for him.

The receipts are here: Bill Hill’s now-scrubbed campaign strategy called for a general election with ‘no Democratic candidates’