Eric Jones, Red-Boxing, & the AI Money Nobody’s Talking About

And update to the series on the race for congress in California CD04 (Links below)

By Judy Tipple

[Reposted with permission of the author. See original at https://rosietheboomer.substack.com/p/eric-jones-red-boxing-and-the-ai]

OK, I admit it… I’m a political nerd. Many years of campaigns, more FEC filings read than I’d like to admit. And I had never heard of “red-boxing” until a friend flagged it to me last week. Wait till you hear what it means — because once you see it, you can’t unsee it on every campaign website you visit.

Before I get to that: credit where it’s due. Roberta Millstein at Davisite already dug up the core of Jones’s Dragoneer ties and his Super PAC connections. Read her full series here: Who is Eric Jones? A summary of the series. This piece adds a few new pieces to her picture.

1. Red-Boxing: The website is talking to PACs, not to you

Jones’s campaign site has a page — not in the main menu, you have to know where to look — that reads less like a pitch to voters and more like a memo to an ad-buyer. It tells you what you “need to see,” what you “need to hear,” on what timeline. That’s a known, legal-but-gray tactic called red-boxing: campaigns aren’t allowed to privately hand a Super PAC their ad copy, so instead they post it publicly and let the PAC “discover” it — no phone call required, no coordination on paper. It’s used by both parties nationwide, so it’s not unique to Jones. What is fair to point out: he’s built his brand on refusing PAC money, while his own site is doing PAC-facing work in plain sight. That is red-boxing.

2. Follow the money, follow the name, follow the family

Start with the money: New Leadership Now, the Super PAC boosting Jones, has raised $3,417,000. Of that, it’s spent $2,711,151.40 working to elect him — $1,457,062.68 attacking Thompson and $1,254,088.72 promoting Jones directly. We pulled the complete itemized donor list straight from the FEC and sorted every contribution by who’s actually behind it. We’re not naming individuals here — the FEC link above has every name, for anyone who wants to check our work — but the pattern is the story:

• 87.7% of the entire PAC — $2,997,000 — traces directly to Dragoneer’s own inner circle: the wife of founder Marc Stad (who alone gave $2 million across two checks), multiple sitting Dragoneer partners, a trust tied to Dragoneer’s co-founding President, and the original financial backer who bankrolled Marc Stad’s career before Dragoneer even existed.
• A smaller slice comes from other Bay Area VC and fintech figures with no confirmed Dragoneer tie — same donor class, not same named individual, in the careful language this file uses throughout.
• The rest is individuals we haven’t yet been able to identify.

Strip away the “independent expenditure” label and what’s left is simple: the Super PAC bankrolling over a million dollars of ads for Jones is funded almost entirely by the people who ran his former firm and their families.

3. His AI conflict is real — his position isn’t on record

Jones’s own financial disclosures show he still has up to $30 million invested with Dragoneer, which continues to pay him roughly $1 million a year — a documented conflict of interest for anyone weighing in on AI policy in Congress. Dragoneer’s AI stakes aren’t limited to one company: the firm is a confirmed investor in both Anthropic and OpenAI. Dragoneer’s OpenAI stake isn’t small, either — it led OpenAI’s August 2025 funding round with a $2.8 billion check, the single largest investment in that $8.3 billion tranche.

Jones does have a public AI platform, and it’s not simple silence — but read closely, it doesn’t say what it sounds like it says. He wants more AI infrastructure built in the U.S., stating plainly that he wants “the foundational models, the advanced chips, the data centers, and the top talent” here rather than overseas — a real, specific ask that lines up with his donor network’s core financial interest in more data centers getting built, not fewer.

On regulation, his platform calls for a “strong national framework” — but buried in that framework is a preemption clause: the federal baseline “must preempt conflicting state laws that undermine it,” even while claiming to let states “go further.” Nobody says who decides what counts as “conflicting” or “undermining.” That’s the exact fight Bonta is already having with Washington. California’s AI laws have real teeth specifically because they tend to become the de facto national standard once passed — the same pattern that turned California’s vehicle emissions rules and privacy law into national benchmarks companies build to everywhere. A federal framework with vague preemption language is a way to cap that leverage before it can work the same way on AI — and even Anthropic, one of Dragoneer’s own portfolio companies, has publicly backed California’s current AI transparency law, which makes Jones’s hedgier framing harder to explain as simply following his donors’ lead.

One more thing, for the record

Architectural Digest ran a June 9 home tour of Jones’s wife’s design work on their $4.6 million Napa property. Fox News has already used it against him — running the AD photos alongside his $86 million asset disclosure to contrast with his affordability messaging. Worth noting plainly: that contrast is now public and already being used from the right, not something we’re introducing.