An advocacy group backed by Facebook received a $34 million donation from an anonymous donor as it waged a battle against antitrust legislation that would have more tightly regulated the tech industry.
A person who works with the group, American Edge Project, told CNBC that the $34 million was from Facebook. This person declined to be named in order to speak freely about the group’s finances.
The nonprofit raised the massive amount almost two years ago, according to the organization’s latest 990 tax forms. The documents reflect the nonprofit’s finances starting on Nov. 1, 2020, and carrying into Oct. 31, 2021. These disclosures are the most recent tax records available for public viewing and do not list names of the group’s donors.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment and referred CNBC to American Edge instead.
Doug Kelly, American Edge’s CEO, told CNBC in a statement that “the threats to America’s technological edge have a profound impact on our national security and economic well being and we’re leading the charge to make sure everyone is aware.”
The new documents show the tech advocacy group scored its biggest fundraising haul yet when bipartisan lawmakers on Capitol Hill were attempting to take on tech giants, including through antitrust legislation that didn’t pass Congress and a hearing in March 2021 featuring tech CEOs such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook changed its name to Meta in late 2021.
The American Edge Project launched its first pro-tech industry ad in 2020. The group’s previous 990 forms, from 2019 through late 2020, showed it raised all of its money from a single anonymous $4 million donation during that period. Facebook confirmed in 2020 to The Washington Post that it was contributing to the group. The person who works with American Edge told CNBC that the $4 million was also entirely from Facebook.
American Edge launched a wave of TV and digital ads from late 2020 through 2021, taking on antitrust proposals. A TV spot funded by the group suggested that small-business innovation could be affected if such legislation made its way through Congress.
In June 2021, the House Judiciary Committee passed a package of sweeping tech antitrust reforms. The measures proposed new rules on the largest online platforms, like requiring them to have capabilities for users to easily transfer their data to other services, shifting the burden of proof in merger cases onto dominant tech platforms, blocking platforms from operating businesses with conflicts of interest and from advantaging their own products on platforms they run.
The Senate later introduced a version of one of the bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, in October 2021, which aimed to bar self-preferencing on dominant tech services. That bill advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2022.
Taken together, the bills were poised to create a much more uncertain legal environment for Facebook and its peers, including by making it harder to acquire firms that could help their businesses grow.
Almost all of these bills did not get a full House or Senate vote after Big Tech companies and their industry groups opposed the pieces of legislation, saying they would impose unfair restrictions and result in negative effects for consumers. For example, Chamber of Progress, backed by Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, has warned that the Senate bill would significantly alter Amazon Prime’s offerings like two-day shipping and make it harder to offer low-cost basics from its first-party brand, for fear of being charged with illegal self-preferencing.
American Edge spent over $5 million between TV and digital ads in 2021, according to data from AdImpact. It spent over $10 million on TV ads last year, AdImpact says. The group went into 2022 with over $13 million in net assets, according to its 990 forms.
The $34 million donation also came as American Edge announced it was adding former Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., as advisory board co-chairs to “lead the coalition’s efforts on internet openness, accessibility and free expression,” according to the press release. Walden is still listed on the group’s website as a leader of an advisory board, while Heitkamp is no longer listed.
A 2022 report by the watchdog Tech Transparency Project says Facebook isn’t just a “contributor” to American Edge, as the company confirmed to The Washington Post, but potentially its “sole funder.” The Tech Transparency Project receives funding from the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Bohemian Foundation and Omidyar Network, according to its website.
American Edge’s website lists Facebook as a member of their supportive coalition. Other listed members include Bear Hill Advisors, the Center for Individual Freedom, NetChoice, the Connected Commerce Council, the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the National Small Business Association.
Facebook itself has spent over $58 million since the start of 2020 on federal lobbying, according to data compiled by the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.
Beyond the $34 million donation, the only other contribution listed on the tax disclosure was an another anonymous donation – of $25,000. The multimillion-dollar contribution allowed American Edge to spend just over $19 million on what the forms refer to as media placement and strategic services.
The 990 forms, which were signed and filed by the group in 2022, also show that powerful consulting firms that work for American Edge also received over $3 million combined from the organization. Cavalry LLC, a firm founded by former strategists of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was paid $1.1 million by American Edge from November 2020 through October 2021. The Washington Post reported that John Ashbrook, a founding partner at Cavalry and a former McConnell advisor, is helping guide the group.
Global Strategy Group, a political and corporate consulting firm that was founded by three Democratic strategists, received $910,000 from American Edge over that same time period. GSG has a history of working with Big Tech. Amazon previously employed the group while the company fought unionization efforts. Amazon itself has donated to a similar group while that nonprofit took on tech-related legislation.
The Washington Post reported that Jim Papa, a partner at Global Strategy Group who was an aide to former President Barack Obama, was also helping the organization. Papa says on his GSG profile page that among his current and former clients is FWD.us, a fellow 501(c)(4) nonprofit that was co-founded by Zuckerberg and actively lobbies on immigration-related issues.
A GSG representative did not return requests for comment.
Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.
About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.
Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.
The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.
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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.
Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.
The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.
Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.
Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.
Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.
“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”
Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.
Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.
“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.
‘AI’s moment to shine’
Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nikealready raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.
Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.
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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.
Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”
Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.
‘Not a silver bullet’
While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.
“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”
AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.
“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty. But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.
The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.
“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.
“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.
On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.
“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”
Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.
A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.
The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”
If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.
Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.
The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”
Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”
While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.
Teslais promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.