Corporate political activism is widely used by firms to pursue strategic objectives through political influence, yet it also carries important implications for off-balance-sheet exposures such as intangible liabilities. To examine the relationship between political activism through lobbying and intangible liabilities, this study primarily draws on two competing theoretical perspectives: the resource-based view (RBV) and moral hazard theory (MHT). From an RBV perspective, lobbying may mitigate intangible liabilities by reducing regulatory uncertainty and stabilising firms’ operating environments, whereas MHT predicts that lobbying can intensify managerial opportunism and increase reputational and legal risks. Using a novel text-based measure of intangible liabilities, we find that firms engaging more actively in political lobbying accumulate significantly higher intangible liabilities, lending support to the moral hazard perspective. We also show that this association is shaped by firm characteristics, with stronger effects observed among firms with weaker governance structures, poorer organizational culture, and greater exposure to political corruption, while institutional monitoring and stakeholder orientation mitigate these adverse effects. Further analyses identify litigation risk, reputational damage, and corporate misconduct as key channels through which lobbying contributes to the accumulation of intangible liabilities. To address reverse causality concerns, we employ a difference-in-differences design exploiting the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, and a series of robustness tests, including parallel trends and placebo tests, entropy balancing, and two-stage least squares estimation, further supports the validity of our findings.