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Hey Kaitlyn, We start reporting articles that don't turn into articles all the time. In this case, I began investigating an AI lobbying firm called LobbyMatic earlier this year, but got tied up with other things and never ended up publishing anything. LobbyMatic became newly relevant, however, when Politico revealed that it is secretly being run by Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, two right-wing activists who have been convicted of fraud. So I picked my reporting back up and turned it into this piece. -Jason Monday, Politico revealed that convicted fraudsters and right-wing activists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been secretly operating a company that purports to do AI-powered lobbying called LobbyMatic. 404 Media has learned that the company also, for months, advertised in screenshots that major companies were using its product; many of these companies told us that they have never been clients of LobbyMatic. LobbyMatic purports to be “the AI automation platform for lobbyists,” and claims that it can help companies and lobbyists use AI to create a lobbying strategy, to create talking points, to analyze hearings and bills, and to track legislative progress of bills.
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Wohl and Burkman have been running the company under the pseudonyms “Jay Klein” and “Bill Sanders,” and had signed up Toyota, the lobbying firm Boundary Stone Partners, and the drug company Lantheus, according to Politico. Back in January, I became aware of LobbyMatic and began to do some cursory reporting on the company. At the time, the company was writing blog posts on Medium under the name “Pat Smith,” an AI-generated woman who doesn’t exist. On its website, LobbyMatic was also showing demo screenshots of its software that seemed to suggest that its software was being widely used by lobbyists for major companies. One screenshot, for example, showed a sidebar that listed “Clients” including Visa, Toyota, SalesForce, and Pfizer. Other demo screenshots suggested it was lobbying on behalf of Capital One, Lockheed Martin, Meta, Fidelity, the lobbying firm Holland & Knight, Home Depot, Palantir, and Microsoft. I emailed all of these companies, and six of them (Pfizer, Microsoft, Palantir, Home Depot, Lockheed Martin, and Holland & Knight) told me that they were not clients of LobbyMatic (the others, Meta, Fidelity, Visa, Capital One, SalesForce, and Toyota, did not respond). Several of the companies that responded told me that they had never heard of LobbyMatic and had no idea why their companies were being shown in product demos. A Microsoft spokesperson told me that it is not a client of LobbyMatic. Pfizer said “I can confirm they are not a vendor.” Palantir said “LobbyMatic is not and has never been a Palantir customer. Looks like they are using us as an example of a ‘client’ for a potential customer firm, which we are not, nor have we authorized the use of our name & logo.” Lockheed Martin told me it had never heard of the company. Home Depot said “we’re not a client of LobbyMatic.” And Holland & Knight said “checked on this and we are not a client of LobbyMatic.” Sometime after my round of emails, these screenshots were removed from LobbyMatic’s website, or were cropped to remove the names of specific supposed clients. Some of these original screenshots are still available on the Internet Archive.
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“With LobbyMatic’s groundbreaking AI technology, you can draft technically detailed, legally fluent regulatory comment letters 10x faster than ever before,” the company wrote in a Medium post. “LobbyMatic’s advanced natural language generation capabilities allow you to instantly produce insightful comment letters on complex regulatory issues. You can even use LobbyMatic to draft a regulatory comment letter from the perspective of your opponent — anticipating their likely talking points and arguments before they even make them.” Boundary Stone Partners, one of the companies who actually did use the platform, however, told Politico that “we quickly determined the tool did not work and terminated our contract two months ago.” Wohl and Burkman were convicted in 2022 of felony telecom fraud because they ran a robocall campaign in which they told people living in majority Black neighborhoods not to vote by mail. The two right-wing activists were fined $5 million by the FCC and were ordered to spend 500 hours registering people to vote. According to Politico, they launched LobbyMatic under the pseudonyms “Jay Klein” and “Bill Sanders,” and operated the company under these pseudonyms for months. Eventually, one of their own employees grew suspicious of the company, and the fact that people kept referring to Wohl as “Jacob” and not “Jay.” That employee took a photo of Wohl in the office, ran a reverse image search, and determined that “Jay Klein” was actually Jacob Wohl. LobbyMatic did not respond to a request for comment.
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