One Bill. One Candidacy. One Hundred Million Dollars in Response.
About sixteen weeks ago, a story began quietly taking shape in New York that has since grown into one of the most watched test cases in American political history. Alex Bores, a state assemblymember representing Manhattan's Upper East Side, had spent years using a computer science background and a seat in the state legislature to do something almost no American lawmaker had done: actually pass a serious artificial intelligence safety bill.
The law Bores shepherded — New York's RAISE Act, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in December 2025 — is not radical by any measure. It requires large AI developers to publish safety protocols, disclose known risks, and report serious misuse of their systems. Common-sense accountability for some of the most powerful technology ever developed, applied by a government that is supposed to represent the public interest. When Bores announced his campaign for the open U.S. House seat in New York's 12th Congressional District — the Manhattan seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler — the reaction from Silicon Valley was immediate and revealing.
A super PAC network called Leading the Future, backed by more than $100 million from major AI investors, announced that Alex Bores would be its first political target in the 2026 midterms.
The super PAC network has been funded by some of the most prominent names in the AI and tech investment world. Key backers include Andreessen Horowitz, the powerful venture capital firm that has become one of Washington's most aggressive tech lobbying forces, and Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI, who was among Donald Trump's largest mega-donors in the second half of 2025. Also connected is Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a prominent Trump supporter. Their stated goal is to defeat candidates who support state-level AI regulation and to build a more "innovation-friendly" Congress — meaning, one less inclined to impose safety requirements on their industry.
Millions in Ads, a Cease-and-Desist Letter, and the Ghost of Sam Bankman-Fried
The campaign against Bores has escalated in waves since the initial announcement. Leading the Future and its affiliate Think Big PAC have now spent nearly $2 million on ads attacking Bores — a stunning figure for a local congressional primary that, in a normal cycle, might turn on neighborhood endorsements and city council allies. The first round of ads focused on Bores' past employment at Palantir, the controversial data and AI company. The ads alleged that Bores had helped build technology used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a charge that Bores flatly denies and that his campaign challenged with a cease-and-desist letter calling the claim "false and defamatory."
Bores has said he left Palantir precisely because of the company's ICE work, which he found ethically indefensible. The PAC's position carried an element of irony that was not lost on observers: Joe Lonsdale — one of the prominent backers of the very group attacking Bores for his Palantir employment — is himself a Palantir co-founder. The PAC's spokesperson, when asked about this, explained that Lonsdale donated to a separate, Republican-oriented arm of the Leading the Future network, not the Democratic-facing Think Big PAC running the ads in Bores' primary. This is, as distinctions go, a fine one.
By late March, the attacks had taken a new turn. Think Big PAC distributed mailers tying Bores to more than $100,000 in past support from Sam Bankman-Fried's 2022 political network — raising the specter of the disgraced, convicted FTX founder against a candidate whose signature issue is regulating the very tech and crypto industries Bankman-Fried once exemplified. The mailers urged voters to "do better than Bores." His campaign did not respond to press inquiries on the mailer.
"These are people who want unbridled control over the American workforce and education system, over our utility bills. If they get that, it's worth a lot of money to them. $100 million is insane — but in some sense it's just a VC investment. Their returns could be trillions."
— Alex Bores, to NOTUSA Times Columnist Sees the Pattern — and Names It
Writing in The New York Times last week, opinion contributor E.J. Dionne Jr. placed the AI and crypto campaign finance story in its full historical context — and the Bores case, though he did not name it explicitly, embodies precisely the dynamic Dionne described. His argument is not that industry groups lack a right to participate in politics. It is that the radical financial imbalance now created by a decade of permissive campaign finance law has effectively ended the public's ability to be heard in the debates that matter most.
Dionne recalled how the crypto industry spent $40 million in the final weeks against Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown in 2024 — after Brown, as chair of the Banking Committee, called for strict crypto oversight. Brown lost. His colleagues noticed. In Illinois last week, crypto groups spent $10 million in a Democratic Senate primary against a candidate who lost — but also spent nearly $1 million to push a pro-regulation state senator to third place in another race. The message being sent is not just about winning elections. It is about what happens to legislators who stand between an industry and its preferred regulatory environment.
Dionne's prescription — robust disclosure requirements and public matching funds for small contributions — reflects the reform tradition of earlier American eras. After the first Gilded Age, the Progressive Era reformed money's role in politics. After Watergate, the 1970s brought new limits. Each reform was eventually eroded, and concentrated money found its way back. The question for this generation, Dionne argues, is whether it will act before the damage becomes irreversible.
The NY-12 race has produced an unusual spectacle: competing super PACs, both nominally pro-AI, fighting each other over what kind of AI Congress should enable. Leading the Future — backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI's Brockman — wants no state-level regulation and a "light-touch" federal approach. Public First Action — backed by Anthropic's $20 million donation — favors transparency, safety standards, and public oversight. Public First founder Brad Carson put the asymmetry plainly: "We have $50 million and 85% of the public sentiment. They have $100 million and 15% of public opinion. Which of those is most likely to win?" A Gallup poll found that 80% of Americans support AI safety requirements even if they slow development.
$175 Million Raised. $9 Million Spent. The War Has Barely Started.
Perhaps the most sobering fact in the entire landscape is this: AI-focused political organizations have now raised more than $175 million to spend in the 2026 midterm elections. As of mid-March, only $9.36 million of that sum had been deployed. The money that has produced weeks of attack ads against Alex Bores — the cease-and-desist letters, the Palantir allegations, the SBF mailers — represents a tiny fraction of what the industry has prepared to spend. The primary in NY-12 is not yet decided. The primaries in dozens of other districts have not yet begun. The Bores race, as Brad Carson of Public First told NOTUS, is a test: can industry money shift opinion in a race where the public is broadly skeptical of the industry's position?
The outcome of that test will shape how $165 million in remaining AI PAC money gets deployed across the rest of the 2026 cycle. The legislators who have been watching — in Washington and in state capitals — are drawing their own conclusions about what it costs to stand between Silicon Valley and the regulatory environment it wants. That is, as Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in dissent a decade ago, precisely how a free marketplace of political ideas loses its point.
"Where enough money calls the tune, the general public will not be heard."
— Justice Stephen Breyer, dissent in McCutcheon v. FEC (2014)A Primary to Watch — and a Template Being Written in Real Time
The NY-12 Democratic primary is expected to be one of the most closely watched races in the 2026 cycle for reasons that go beyond campaign finance. The district — spanning Midtown Manhattan, the Upper West Side, and the Upper East Side — is among the wealthiest in the country and has produced decades of progressive congressional leadership under Jerry Nadler. Now it is the proving ground for a question that will define the next decade of American governance: can democratic accountability survive an era of industry-scale political spending?
The most recent available polling, shared by Public First Action, put Bores at 20% — leading the field that includes Kennedy family scion Jack Schlossberg and former Trump critic George Conway. Notably, only 12% of Bores' $2.2 million in campaign donations have come from within the district itself. He has been fundraising nationally — including in San Francisco — to build a war chest capable of matching, even imperfectly, the industry money arrayed against him. His campaign's spokesperson put it with unusual directness: "The worst people in America are spending $10 million against Alex. He is raising money from ordinary Americans wherever he can get it to fight back."
Whether that fight — ordinary donors versus a $100 million industry PAC — produces the outcome Bores and his supporters hope for will be one of the defining data points of this political moment. E.J. Dionne is right that America has been here before, and has reformed before. The question is whether it still can.