Inside The $26m Tech Industry War On Tuesday’s Ballot

NEW YORK — The tech industry’s political influence will be put to the ultimate test Tuesday.

A whopping $26 million from groups affiliated with major tech players has poured into the Manhattan race to succeed retiring Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. The groups have one target in mind: Assemblymember Alex Bores.

Bores, one of more than a half-dozen candidates on the Democratic primary ballot in New York’s 12th Congressional District, has become the poster child for the debate over how to regulate artificial intelligence. His rise comes as Congress struggles to move forward on a comprehensive AI framework, which the White House is eager to enact by the year’s end. Advancement of a bipartisan AI standard on the federal level has been complicated by efforts to incorporate preemption of state AI laws into proposed legislation — a provision Democrats are largely unwilling to support.

“This is the first congressional race in the country where the dividing line is: can the public stand up to the powerful and protect people from threats like AI, or will the most powerful billionaires in this country win again?” Bores’ campaign wrote in a memo last week.

That fight has shaped the race for NY-12, one of the country’s most well-educated and wealthiest districts. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, around $8 million of outside spending attacking Bores has come from Think Big, a group affiliated with Leading the Future, which is backed by leaders at OpenAI and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others. Leading the Future’s network of super PACs are spending big across the country with the goal of backing candidates it sees as supportive of tech innovation — and taking down those who stand in the way — regardless of party affiliation.

Bores, a former employee-turned-critic of data analytics firm Palantir, is the largest investment the group has made this election cycle. Leading the Future is looking to make an example of Bores, who wants to nationalize the RAISE Act, a state law he sponsored and one of the country’s landmark measures establishing guardrails for AI.

Critics have decried Leading the Future as being “anti-regulation.” But the group has said its “goal is to support a well-balanced, cross-partisan conversation about artificial intelligence, which today starts with passing a strong and thoughtful national regulatory framework.”

Still, if it’s successful in taking Bores down, that will be a clear warning sign for other politicians looking to implement sweeping AI regulation: There’s more money where that came from.

Those supporting Bores are skeptical of Leading the Future’s influence, though.

“This project of trying to destroy a candidate like Alex, I think, will probably die in New York 12 as well, even if Alex loses the race, because the reason that is so expensive and they had to spend so much is because they've helped him as much as hurt him,” said former Rep. Brad Carson (D-Okla.), co-founder of Public First Action, an AI super PAC network linked to Anthropic.

Bores’ cause has benefitted from $18 million in spending from those in the tech industry who frame themselves as friendlier to AI regulations. Most of that — $12 million — has come from Jobs and Democracy, a Public First Action super PAC. An additional $2.5 million has come from Dream NYC, another group funded in large part by an Anthropic employee. You Can Push Back, a group backed by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, has also spent more than $3 million boosting Bores. And Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC backed by unions and tech workers, has put in around $300,000.

That massive spending has sparked criticism from Bores’ opponents, who contend he can’t be an independent voice on tech policy while being boosted by some of those very interests.

It’s a message Think Big has sought to hammer home in its outreach to voters. The group has accused Bores of being “bought and sold.” In a recent mail advertisement, it argued that outside spending with ties to Anthropic is the “biggest hypocrisy of all.”

Leading the Future spokesperson Josh Vlasto said in a statement that the organization is “proud to stand against that unprecedented effort” of spending from groups propping up Bores and “for a transparent, national AI framework that serves workers, families, and the country.”

Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, another major contender for the seat, said in an interview with Vanity Fair that when it comes to AI, there should be “disinterested regulators, not those who have been bankrolled by one company and not another.”

A mailer from state Assemblymember Micah Lasher, one of the other frontrunners for the seat, features a top surrogate bashing Bores’ super PAC support. “A web of shadowy super PACs, led by a cryptocurrency billionaire, is spending millions to send Alex Bores to Congress,” reads a quote from Nadler, who endorsed Lasher. “We shouldn’t let dark money win.”

Lasher himself has benefited from hefty outside spending; former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Lasher’s former boss, has funneled at least $10 million into a super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Lasher has also accused Nuestro PAC, an organization focused on Latino voters that’s spent $3 million attacking him, of being funded by crypto and AI interests, pointing to support Bores has received. Nuestro PAC has denied that accusation.

The back-and-forth over the tech industry’s influence demonstrates just how salient the issue is among voters — many of whom remain skeptical about the benefits of rapidly emerging technologies.

While Leading the Future is training its ire on Bores in this race, it has not explicitly backed one of his opponents in this Democratic primary. All of the major contenders support regulating AI in some form, and Lasher was a cosponsor of the RAISE Act in the Legislature. Schlossberg has called for a federal investigation into rental car companies using AI to scan for damages and tack on fees.

“The race became more about AI money than it did about AI, and part of that is because they do think they can buy off our elections,” said Shaunna Thomas, cofounder of Guardrails Alliance. She added that her group’s goal is to “make sure we turn their strategy into a liability for any of the candidates they support and actually strengthen the candidacy of the candidates who they oppose.”

Some see massive spending in support of Bores as necessary, especially in light of Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that blocked restrictions on political spending.

“You have to put up what you can to fight off the deep-pocketed infinite resources of Big Tech,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a watchdog organization. “I’m glad that the AI safety side and the pro-worker side was able to marshal resources to fight back — and that counterattack absolutely made a difference, and that's what’s going to continue to happen.”

And even if Bores loses, Haworth argued, it will be difficult for groups like Leading the Future to change their public image in races moving forward: “They have toxified themselves,” she said, “by thinking they can throw a bunch of money at the problem and it could go away.”

Candidates affiliated with Big Tech’s brand have struggled to gain traction elsewhere in the country as voters become more and more concerned with the rising influence of these technologies — a dynamic that was especially striking in California’s primary election earlier this month.

While there are plenty of other factors in these races — including in the campaign for Nadler’s seat — Leading the Future itself has had a relatively strong track record so far on the federal level this cycle. (The group is also playing in state-level races.)

Per the FEC, Think Big has spent around $7 million across a handful of other races this year to support Reps. Ritchie Torres, Joe Morelle and Yvette Clarke of New York; Jimmy Panetta in California; Val Hoyle in Oregon; and Rob Menendez in New Jersey. It also backed candidates Ben McAdams in Utah, along with former Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. and Melissa Bean in Illinois. Jackson Jr. lost his primary, and Bean won hers. McAdams’ primary is on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, American Mission, Leading the Future’s super PAC that supports Republicans, has spent close to $8 million supporting candidates across the country. They include South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham; Georgia Rep. Clay Fuller; California Rep. Jay Obernolte; and Reps. Andy Barr, Kevin Hern, Julia Letlow and Barry Moore, who are running for Senate in Kentucky, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Alabama, respectively. It has also spent for Montana Senate candidate Kurt Alme, as well House hopefuls Laurie Buckhout in North Carolina, Chris McGowan in Iowa, Amanda McKinney in Washington, Aaron Flint in Montana, Houston Gaines and James Kingston in Georgia, and Tom Sell, Jessica Steinmann and Jace Yarbrough in Texas. Of those who have already had their primaries, all won; Letlow is in a runoff, which will take place this weekend.

Amid all of the debate about political spending from these tech power players, the lobbying campaigns of leading AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic have been thrust into the spotlight. But OpenAI has sought to distance itself from Leading the Future in recent weeks. The company released a blog this month clarifying the company’s relationship to the group, despite OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife contributing roughly $25 million to Leading the Future.

“We want to be explicit: No outside political group speaks for OpenAI or represents our company’s views,” the company wrote.

Anthropic, too, has looked to create space. A spokesperson said its donation to Public First Action was “restricted” from being used for federal elections — though that money is difficult to track, because Public First Action is a 501(c)(4).

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman further pushed back on the company’s influence on election spending, arguing that it has spent significantly less than their competitors and called for money to be removed from politics entirely.

“You can't hold us to a different standard than all of our competitors. If they're trying to use money to gang up on us, we have to be able to fight back,” Altman told reporters on Capitol Hill this month. “But I would love to see the rules across the board change.”