By the time that the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th congressional district wraps up in June, Anthropic and OpenAI will have spent millions on their battle over the political future of AI: who gets to regulate it, or who will be punished for trying to regulate it. But the real winner of their feud may be the guy they’re currently fighting over: a once-obscure New York state assemblyman, who they’ve Streisand-effected into becoming the poster child for AI safety regulation.
Ever since late 2025, Leading the Future, a super PAC funded by OpenAI, Palantir, and a16z executives, has spent millions against Alex Bores, who wrote one of the first pieces of AI regulatory legislation in the country. The PAC hoped to kill his bid for the seat about to be vacated by longtime Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler. Instead, Bores is now a front-runner in the eight-person race to become the “face of Manhattan,” as New York Magazine recently put it in a cover feature.
And shockingly, he pulled all this off without running a massive ad campaign. In fact, the Bores campaign told The Verge that it had placed its very first ad buy in New York on May 11th, nearly seven months after Bores entered the race and only weeks before the polls close on June 23rd. In contrast, Leading the Future, whose backers include Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, has been running attack ads against Bores since December 2025, spending an estimated total of $2.4 million according to the most recent reports.
In any other situation, a corporate- and billionaire-backed super PAC, which is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for a candidate or ballot initiative so long as it does not coordinate with the campaign, could outspend a target into oblivion. The group behind Leading the Future had already done so successfully in the 2024 election, ousting Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) via Fairshake, a crypto industry super PAC. And it would surely have the upper hand in Manhattan: Way back in December, Think Big PAC, which is affiliated with Leading the Future, spent $120,000 to run a single anti-Bores attack ad on television and digital. “It is so expensive to advertise in a New York primary,” said Lis Smith, a New York-based political operative who ran Pete Buttigieg’s dark horse 2020 presidential campaign, and whose career involved stints with Govs. Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer. “The New York media market is the most expensive media market in the country. You’d kill for any bit of air time.”
When Bores entered the race last October, the ex-Palantir employee-turned-public servant faced several other candidates with broader name recognition and deep-pocketed backers. Micah Lasher, a fellow New York state assemblyman, has the backing of Nadler’s New York political machine, as well as Mike Bloomberg’s super PAC. Jack Schlossberg, the influencer and grandson of John F. Kennedy, has the support of the national Democratic establishment nostalgic for Camelot. George Conway, the Donald Trump critic and ex-husband of former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, has won over the Never Trumper crowd. “I’m gonna be honest with you, [Bores] wasn’t exactly a well-known quantity prior to becoming a target of these AI companies,” Smith said.
Reached for comment, Josh Vlasto, a spokesperson for Leading the Future, said, “From day one, we have said what is now playing out in plain sight: Alex Bores is bought and sold by Anthropic, its investors like Chris Larsen, the Effective Altruist community, and a network of dark money fringe tech groups. He has three super PACs funded by Anthropic, its investors, executives, and their allies who are trying to buy regulatory control of AI for themselves. Any group or endorser who thinks that by backing Alex Bores they are taking on billionaires is either foolish or needs to do a quick Google search.”
Instead of smothering Bores’ candidacy, however, the AI companies only elevated his visibility. A new poll released last week by Emerson College shows him neck-and-neck with Lasher, trailing him by two points, and Bores has consistently taken the lead against his rivals in recent polling. In an odd way, Leading the Future’s ad buys became an in-kind donation to the Bores campaign, in the form of a free, multimillion-dollar ad campaign that did the hard work of raising voter awareness that Bores even existed.
“For people for whom it wasn’t top of mind, they made it top of mind.”
Alyssa Cass, a spokeswoman for the Bores campaign, said that they’d initially thought it would be harder to make voters care about AI safety. “AI [regulation] is his strength, but it’s gonna take us a lot of work to make this a salient issue in the district,” she told The Verge. “And they, starting in December, started doing that work for us, of raising the saliency of AI and AI regulation, and making people think: Who are these people? What do they want to do to me, and to our society? For people for whom it wasn’t top of mind, they made it top of mind.”
Suddenly, voters who’d been unaware of Bores were getting mailers and ads describing him as anti-AI and pro-regulation, highlighting his authorship of the RAISE Act, a New York state law that placed restrictions on the release of frontier AI models and had been signed into law in December.
The ads became an unintentional signal booster: The more that Leading the Future attacked Bores, the more media coverage it drew, and the more voters became aware that a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley AI billionaires was trying to influence a Manhattan election, specifically targeting a candidate who wanted to regulate AI. It also inadvertently gave Bores the “it” factor that differentiated him from seven other Democrat candidates running in Manhattan on a platform of holding Donald Trump accountable: He was, quite literally, being targeted by tech billionaires who were donating to Trump’s ballroom in exchange for AI deregulation. Internal campaign polling, in fact, shows that voters who had received negative information about Bores were more inclined to vote for him.
It also didn’t hurt that the AI companies’ ads were easy for Bores to mock. One of their first ads criticized Bores for working at Palantir during a period where the controversial tech company had contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and suggested that Bores was hypocritical for now saying he wanted to abolish ICE. Bores filed a cease-and-desist against LTF for defaming him, claiming that he had left Palantir because he opposed its relationship with ICE. He also noted on social media that it was “ironic” that a Palantir billionaire was attacking him for working at Palantir.
And this was even before an intervention from Anthropic brought the race to national awareness. In February, the Jobs and Democracy PAC, which is affiliated with the pro-regulation super PAC Public First Action, announced that it would back Bores. Outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Politico began covering the fight over Bores as part of the long-standing rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI company that positions itself as the more responsible of the frontier labs — and which had just donated $20 million to Public First Action, in direct opposition to Leading the Future and its ties to OpenAI.
This kind of media exposure is unheard of in House races. “You’d kill for any earned media, you’d kill for any paid media,” said Smith. “So the fact that he’s getting all this paid media, when he was a virtual unknown outside of extremely political insider circles before — it’s a gift.”