The $27 million Al proxy war over Alex Bores ends in a draw

The expensive, $27 million political proxy war between Anthropic and OpenAI came to a draw last night when Alex Bores, a New York state Assemblyman whose popularity surged after being targeted by a pro-AI super PAC, narrowly lost the Democratic primary to represent New York’s 12th Congressional district.

Prior to the race, Bores, a former tech industry employee, had coauthored and successfully passed the high-profile RAISE Act, which had implemented guardrails and safety requirements on frontier AI companies; a version of his bill was signed into state law last year. But the legislation drew the ire of Leading the Future, a $100 million super PAC backing a deregulatory agenda in this year’s midterms that was funded partially by OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz executives. But his candidacy drew nationwide attention after several other AI-centric super PACs connected to Anthropic began pouring millions into the NY-12 race to defend Bores. (Legally, Bores is not allowed to coordinate his campaign with super PACs.) In the end, the once-obscure Bores came in second to Assemblyman Micah Lasher, 35 percent to 39.1 percent, according to the most recent ballot count.

Ultimately, according to FEC filings, the AI companies spent $27.41 million warring over Bores’s candidacy. Combined, the pro-Bores super PACS — Jobs and Democracy PAC, Dream NYC, You Can Push Back, and the Guardrails Alliance — spent $19.26 million to support Bores, while Leading the Future spent $8.15 million. All in all, an unusually massive amount of money was spilled for one local election — a primary, no less — because it was seen as a bellwether for how the midterms might go, especially when it comes to AI regulation.

But several factors well outside of AI issues factor into Bores’s loss. In fact, local Manhattan politics likely remained the most important aspect. The 35-year-old assemblyman had entered the race facing a steep challenge against Lasher, long viewed as the protégé of the district’s retiring Congressman Jerry Nadler (D-NY), and backed by a super PAC run by former New York City mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg. (Lasher, notably, had also been a cosponsor of the RAISE Act.) The support of the city’s political establishment ultimately carried Lasher over the finish line, but Bores outperformed two other high-profile contenders: Jack Schlossberg, the 33-year old grandson of president John F. Kennedy, trailed at third with 10.8 percent, while George Conway, the former Republican lawyer who’d become famous for his antagonism against Donald Trump, came in a distant, unexpected fifth place, behind Nina Schwalbe, with just 7.1 percent.

But the national narrative around Bores’s race had a different meaning, given that three of the super PACs supporting him were backed by industry entities critical of OpenAI and other pro-innovation, anti-regulatory industry players. Jobs and Democracy PAC was funded by Public First, a super PAC that had received a $20 million donation from the regulation-focused rival company Anthropic. Dream NYC received heavy funding from Dan Ziegler, an early Anthropic employee. And You Can Fight Back was funded by a $3.5 million donation from crypto billionaire and Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen, who’d explicitly told The New York Times that he intended to push against OpenAI’s influence.

In a statement congratulating Lasher on his victory, Bores noted that he had not initially entered the race to make “a singular point about AI,” but argued that his surprisingly close performance illustrated a political reality that may carry into the general elections. “Though we’ve come up short tonight, the example set here was not the one the AI oligarchs intended. They set out to make people afraid to stand up to them. Instead, they learned just how ready people are to push back.”

The general election, however, may prove to be a different battlefield. While NY-12 is all but guaranteed to be held by a Democrat come November, the partisan fights over gubernatorial and congressional seats will increasingly come down to whether GOP candidates support Trump, whose views on AI regulation have been increasingly mercurial. Innumerable other factors will ultimately play a role on voters’ choices, such as inflation, the war with Iran, and data centers, which have become a nationwide concern but a nonfactor in the Manhattan race. But the AI industry’s super PACs have already begun spending millions in other races across the country. According to Transformer’s campaign finance tracker, both sides have dropped a combined $50.1 million across 19 states, with the NY-12 primary being the most expensive, followed by the recent Texas primaries, where they spent a total of $4.6 million across seven races.