NEW YORK CITY — Alex Bores had known for a while that a political operation called Leading the Future, funded by artificial-intelligence industry leaders, would be coming after him in his race to replace Democrat Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th congressional district. He just wasn’t sure how.
The group had promised in November that they would target him, because Bores, a Democratic state assemblymember, had recentlypassed an AI safety bill in the New York legislature widely regarded as the furthest-reaching in the country.
When we spoke earlier this winter, before the group’s ads against him had come out, Bores was gaming out the likeliest attack scenarios. He thought that their strategy would have little to do with the policy issue that actually motivated it. He pointed to public polling showing broad public support for rules governing AI safety.
“I’m sure they won’t come after me on AI,” Bores, 35, told me, sitting in a midtown Manhattan bagel shop between campaign stops, “because they’re in the wrong.” He expected that they’d go after him on higher-profile issues, as similar tech-industry-aligned organizations had with candidates in the past.
He was mostly right — to take down Bores, Leading the Future had to go for the jugular.
The first ad against him,a 42-second spot, was indeed over his bill, the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Safety and Education Act, aka the RAISE Act. The second ad, though, which dropped six weeks later, raised the stakes. It spent 30 seconds pummeling the candidate on his association with one of the most hot-button issues for the left-leaning voters who make up most of his Manhattan district.
“He made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE,” said the ad, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. From 2014 through 2019, Bores had worked at the controversial data analytics company Palantir. In his last nearly year and a half at the firm, Bores had helped lead its strategic partnerships with the federal government. Bores has said that he never worked on the company’s contract with ICE, and quit over his objections to that work.
Left unmentioned was that one of Leading the Future’s founding backers, Joe Lonsdale, was not just a staffer but a co-founder of Palantir. Boressent Leading the Future a cease-and-desist letter, alleging the group made false statements about his work.
“In a Democratic primary, that’s going to be a potent issue,” says Josh Vlasto, a former chief of staff to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who is the co-head of Leading the Future’s day-to-day operations. At the time of the ad’s release, ICE raids across the country and a shooting death by ICE agents in Minnesota were leading the news. “When we decide to engage in a race, we’re going to run the campaign that’s most effective.”
Adam Billen, vice president of public policy at Encode AI, a small Washington-based advocacy organization funded in part by AI skeptics, sees a broader strategy at work in the one-two punch.
The first advertisement, says Billen, is to make painfully clear to everyone watching that what gets a politician on Leading the Future’s bad side is regulating AI. The second is to demonstrate just how dangerous being on that bad side will be.
“Leading the Future’s goal is not actually to kill Alex’s race. Their goal … is to scare other legislators into submission,” says Billen,“[and] to signal to legislators in other races, in other states, that if you step out of line in this way, this is what we’re going to do to you.”
Bores was born and raised in Manhattan. Soon after graduating from Cornell in 2013 with a degree in industrial relations and economics, he joined Palantir. Eager, he says, to acquire hands-on skills, he completed a master’s degree in computer science through the Georgia Institute of Technology’s online program and over the following years worked at a series of tech startups.
In 2022, Bores ran for the New York State Assembly on a platform that included the belief that“one person in Albany should know how tech works.” Heemerged from a competitive primary decided by fewer than 500 votes, and trounced his Republican opponent by nearly 50 points.
After arriving in the state capital, Bores carved a path as a technocrat. In his early days in office, he plotted a chart showing where religious holidays conflicted with state political filing deadlines, and passed a bill shifting the dates. He was particularly interested in tech, especially in using the powers of his office to shape the industry in which he’d cut his teeth. In 2024, Bores won re-election to a second two-year term.
That same year, Bores turned his attention to AI. His motivation, he says, came from what was happening in both Washington and across the country. The Joe Biden administration had by thensecured voluntary commitments from AI companies to ensure that their models were safe. But, Bores says, there seemed to be little prospect of Washington successfully converting those agreements into binding legislation: “There wasn’t a lot of progress being made.”
In the meantime, legislators were beginning to craft bills governing AI safety on a state level. Eventually, Bores reached out to Andrew Gounardes, a Brooklyn Democratic state senator who’d successfully passed tech regulation in Albany over the objections of the tech industry.
Gounardes’ interactions with the tech industry and their lobbyists in Albany had soured him. “They will lie through their teeth in order to convince you that zero regulation is the best thing you can do for technology,” says Gounardes. Bores was somewhat more optimistic. He drafted a bill that, as he saw it, would simply protect the public against emerging AI models’ catastrophic harms, defining those ills as causing more than a hundred deaths or a billion dollars in damages. Among the bill’s provisions were a requirement that major AI companies conduct safety checks on their products and make the results public. The goal, Bores says, was to avoid a dynamic like the one involving U.S. tobacco companies through the 1990s, “where they knew that their products caused cancer but continued to deny it publicly.”
Bores says he eagerly workshopped the bill with AI industry contacts, to the dismay of some allies. One startup founder in New York City close to Bores, who was granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations, says, “I’m like, ‘Brother, these are not your friends.’” After rounds and rounds of revisions — some of the requirements most offensive to the AI industry, like third-party audits of their tools, were dropped — the RAISE Act passed the state legislature in June of 2025 by huge margins.
Bores saw his bill as a reasonable measure. Some in the AI industry saw it as a line in the sand.
When Leading the Futureannounced its launch in August of 2025, what was striking was its war chest; its backers, said the group, had committed more than a $100 million. Those backers included some of the biggest, and wealthiest, names in the AI world. Alongside Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, there was OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife Anna Brockman; the AI company Perplexity; famed venture capitalist Ron Conway; and the legendary venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose founders’ shift to backing candidate Donald Trump the previous summer set off a stampede of Silicon Valley support in the Republican’s direction.
There was news further down in the launch declaration, too. Leading the group would be Vlasto and Zac Moffatt, the Republican founder of the high-profile right-of-center consulting firm Targeted Victory. Vlasto is also the spokesperson for a cryptocurrency-focused Super PAC called Fairshake, which in the 2024 campaign cycle had struck fear in the hearts of many politicians bytargeting crypto skeptics running for office, like then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, who lost his race after 32 years in Congress. Leading the Future declared it would start its efforts in states where legislators were actively writing bills aimed at reining in AI — California, Illinois, Ohio and New York — before going fully national.
The next month, Democrat Jerry Nadler, who’d held his congressional seat for more than 20 years,announced his retirement. It was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for New York City politicians, and Bores quickly jumped into the race to replace him. It was also a big opportunity for Leading the Future: a candidate vocal about the need to check AI through local laws running in — given the density of journalists and other prominent figures — one of the highest-visibility districts in the United States.
In November of 2025, one year before the mid-term election, Leading the Future announced thatBores would be its first target, calling his RAISE Act “a clear example of the patchwork, uninformed, and bureaucratic state laws that would slow American progress and open the door for China to win the global race for AI leadership.”
Bores admits that he was at first rattled. With little other choice, he quickly embraced the attention. By then the field was filling up. Bores would be running against more than a half-dozen other candidates, including a long-time former Nadler aide, Micah Lasher, President John F. Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, and prominent Trump critic George Conway. Leading the Future’s attention, his thinking went, elevated him above the scrum.
What’s more, Bores assumed his district was in line with public opinion on AI; polls in recent months have found the majority of Americans both intrigued by AI’s potential while, increasingly, believing that the government should regulate its development. That’s especially true among Democrats, and the 12th district of Manhattan is overwhelmingly Democratic.
“I don’t find it fun to have millions of dollars against me,” said Bores, speaking ata workshop on AI and journalism in Washington D.C. the same day Leading the Future declared him its first target. And yet, “I appreciate how straightforward they’re being about it when they say, ‘Hey, we’re going to spend millions against Alex because he might regulate ‘Big Tech’ and put basic guardrails on AI.’ I just basically forward that to my constituents.”
Others weren’t so sure. “Being named as a PAC target elevated him above the field,” says Nu Wexler, a tech policy communications consultant who has worked at Google, Facebook and Twitter. But that attention will have been a net negative, say Wexler, “if Leading the Future dumps $2 million worth of ads on his head and he loses the primary.”
The group is well on track to do just that. According to FEC filings, by mid-February of 2025, the group hadspent about $1.3 million to beat Bores. If the group’s objective is to show that “Big Tech” can write a check and swing an election, in New York’s 12th district, the odds are in its favor, says one person familiar with the spending efforts in the AI ecosystem. “Defeat one of eight candidates and call it a victory,” the person said. They were granted anonymity to speak due to the sensitivity of the issue.
Leading the Future’s tactic: beat up on Bores so badly that when the idea of regulating AI development comes up, other politicians run the other direction.
Bores sees it that way. “They’re trying to intimidate anyone from making this an issue,” he says. “Launching a $100-million Super PAC to target anyone who dares to regulate AI, especially at the state level, is sending a message.”
Encode AI’s Billen points to the cryptocurrency industry’s similar — and successful — effort during the 2024 election cycle to target naysayers. “They’ve kind of scared all Democrats into submission on this until the end of time, and that’s what they’re trying to do again here,” he says.
Bores, though, argues that this time things are different: “People don’t really think about crypto unless they are in the industry. Everybody is thinking about AI.”
Another difference this time around: the forces of opposition are quickly getting organized, and funded. Brad Carson is a former Democratic member of the House of Representatives from Oklahoma. To fight Leading the Future, in mid-November he and former Republican congressman from Utah Chris Stewartlaunched Public First, a non-profit group and affiliated Super PACs — a “countervailing voice,” Carson tells me, that was missing from the crypto fight.
Even if polling suggests that the public largely favors AI safety laws, says Carson of Leading the Future, “We understand that people will be scared of a Death Star of $100 million.” In February, the AI company Anthropic — which pitches itself as the conscience of the AI industry — announced it was donating $20 million to Public First, solidifying the midterms as a battle between AI giants.
Days after the Anthropic donation became public, Public First’s affiliated Super PAC released its own ad defending Bores.
“Right-wing billionaires think they can buy this congressional seat,” goes the spot. “Their target: Assemblyman Alex Bores, because he’s the only one who’s stood up to them before.”
In December,amid rumors that New York’s Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul was considering watering down Bores’s RAISE Act, Leading the Future initiated what it called its “opening phase,” marked with the first ad against Bores.
Subtle, it was not. The bill, argued the spot over ominous music, “creates a chaotic patchwork of state rules that would CRUSH innovation, cost New York jobs, and fail to keep people safe.” Bores is presented as a bogeyman, his grim visage superimposed on the Albany state capitol building.
(Hochul would soon sign the bill, with amendments. Industry allies frame the new version assignificantly scaled back.)
Vlasto says the goal of the ad was to frame Bores as an “outlier,” falling outside what the group still hopes will be a bipartisan coalition of serious people who get that the promise of AI is too great to be constrained by state lawmakers’ meddling. The point, says Vlasto, is to make Bores an avatar for a side of the debate that goes beyond reasonable caution to paranoia, full of tin-foil-hatted weirdos and cultists.
“When you look under the hood,” says Vlasto, “you see he is part of this ‘doomer’ ecosystem” often associated with the so-called effective altruism movement. Effective altruists believe in the use of data to organize philanthropic efforts to achieve the greatest public good; some of them believe that unchecked AI development poses an existential threat to that public good.
In the last quarter of 2025, Bores took in around $420,000 in donations from donors affiliated with AI safety groups, many of which have grown out of the “effective altruism” world. He raised another $364,000 from employees of major AI labs. To Bores, that those in the AI trenches would back him makes good sense: “ I think a lot of people in the industry want reasonable regulations.”
Still, not for nothing, then, does the Leading the Future ad flasha December New York Times story noting that a Bores-co-hosted fundraiser for Hochul was attended by “proponents of effective altruism,” followed by a shot of an imprisoned Sam Bankman-Fried — the cryptocurrency industry leader who was a major funder of effective-altruism efforts until he was convicted of fraud and money-laundering in 2024.
“I think I put him in an orange jumpsuit,” says Vlasto. (He did.) Are Assemblymember Bores and the felon Bankman-Fried, the ad asks, “really who should be shaping AI safety for our kids?”
The Bores campaign shows just one side of Leading the Future’s broader efforts to shape policy, but there’s another important side. If the New York ads are a stick, down in Texas, Leading the Future is waving a carrot.
Released at the same time as the first Bores ad to much less fanfare wasa spot backing Chris Gober, an Austin-area conservative lawyer perhaps best known for helping Elon Musk in 2024 establish his Trump-backing America PAC, now running for Congress in Texas’ 10th congressional district. Gober is running, per his campaign website, on “ensuring America’s AI dominance.” Leading the Future put more than $700,000 into running the pro-Gober spot. Says Vlasto of the ad, “we thought it was important to provide that initial contrast of why [Bores’s] policy was so out of whack.” But the contrast that comes across is how much money there is in 2026 in becoming an AI champion.
The ad doesn’t bother mentioning AI — not hugely surprising given that Gober has little record on the subject. The closest it comes is to promise that Gober’s agenda in Washington will include “promoting American technology investment here in Texas,” so as to help the United States defeat China. It’s all enough to catch the attention of ambitious politicians across the country.
“A bunch of us are watching Alex’s race for sure,” says Monique Priestley, a Democrat in Vermont’s House of Representatives currently running for the state Senate. Priestley and Bores, says Priestley, are part of a small group of some 20 tech-focused state legislators across the country who stay in regular communication, both online and in-person through forums like the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Privately, the group confers on everything from the finer points of often technical legislative language to the latest industry attack lines circulating in their state capitals. Per Priestley, industry pressure is having a useful galvanizing effect: “The attention to any of us has helped us want to help each other.” That said, says Priestley, “It’s terrifying. … We’re all pretty nervous.”
At the end of January, Leading the Future reported its latest fundraising numbers: a considerable $50 million for the quarter. Vlasto says the organization currently has $70 million in the bank, with more on the way. It’s eyeing next targets and opportunities. At the start of February, Leading the Future put out on social mediaanother spot going after Bores on Palantir, this time highlighting that employees at the company were donating to his campaign.
Says Bores, “I frankly appreciate their transparency, that they’re saying, ‘Hey, Alex is the biggest obstacle to our quest for unbridled power.’”
