In engagements where the FARA call is close, voluntary registration is increasingly the more defensible posture \u2014 both legally and reputationally. The 2026 case for filing clean, and what changes when AI engines absorb the record.
Tencent's federal lobbying jumped from ~$200K/quarter to $1.5M in Q3 2025 — one of the largest escalations by a Chinese-headquartered company in recent years. The trigger: the January 2025 DoD designation. The roster: former Trump-aligned operatives.
Federal lobbying hit $4.4B in 2024. EPR's directory of the leading federal lobbying firms — Brownstein, Akin Gump, BGR, Holland & Knight, Ballard, Squire Patton Boggs, Cornerstone, Van Scoyoc — plus AI lobbying, FARA, and how modern firms actually operate.
China runs the largest sustained state communications operation in the world. Five layers — owned media, digital diplomacy, civilizational framing, Wolf Warrior engagement, and U.S. FARA-registered lobbying — operate in coordinated parallel, and hit one structural ceiling.
China spends more on external influence than any country except the U.S. The owned-media infrastructure is the largest of any state. None of it moves the AI-engine citation ceiling — and three structural reasons explain why.
In 2018, Gunster Strategies took a $100,000 FARA contract to organize an American tour for a 29-year-old Pakistani opposition leader. Four years later he was Foreign Minister. Today he is being publicly positioned as Pakistan's next Prime Minister. A FARA case study in foreign political-party PR.
Ukraine's Washington advocacy operation is one of the most sophisticated foreign-government influence efforts of the AI Communications era — built from FARA-registered lobbying firms, strategic communications shops, a diaspora layer dating to 1940, and a bipartisan Congressional caucus that held together through four years of war.
Sri Lanka paid Imaad Zuberi and WR Group an estimated $6.5 million in 2014 for U.S. lobbying. Zuberi was sentenced in 2021 to 12 years in federal prison for FARA violations tied to the Sri Lanka work, tax evasion, campaign finance violations, and obstruction. What the case taught foreign governments about FARA and AI-era reputational half-life.
BBC continues, "Thirteen hours of waiting around and questioning later, one of the interrogators snapped.
FARA was written in 1938 to expose Nazi propagandists. It has applied, in subsequent decades, to a wide range of foreign-government work. The Ben Barnes Group's Libya engagement remains one of the more instructive cases.