The Ai Industry Won A Primary Fight. Now Its Target Is Inspiring Lawmakers Nationwide.

A super PAC network backed by artificial intelligence executives hoped to make an example of Alex Bores when it targeted him for defeat in a Democratic House primary over his authorship of a New York AI law.

Instead, the New York State assemblymember has emerged as an inspiration and a source of ideas for state lawmakers nationwide who are pushing for rules to rein in AI — despite losing a congressional primary in June under an $8 million barrage of pro-tech attacks. And Bores increasingly serves a similar animating role for a faction of the AI industry that favors tougher regulations.

His newfound status was apparent at a gathering of hundreds of U.S. state legislators late last month in Chicago, where lawmakers interested in AI regulations made a beeline to meet him, sought out his guidance and frequently mentioned him in interviews.

Monique Priestley, a Democratic state representative from Vermont who has fought for years with the tech lobby, said Bores is helping bring a new crop of state lawmakers into the fight.

“For legislators who have been focused on tech for a while — like, we’re each in our own battles,” she said. “But for people who are coming to the table looking to Alex as inspiration for their own future policy, I think he’s a powerful example of what it looks like to stand up to Big Tech.”

Pro-regulation tech advocates who attended the National Conference of State Legislatures’ summit in Chicago said Bores came up frequently in their own conversations as well.

“I had a legislator say to me at NCSL, basically, ‘I want to be the next Alex Bores,’” said Adam Billen, co-executive director of the pro-regulation group Encode AI.

Bores’ emerging role as an AI policy powerbroker is the latest twist in a 10-month political saga, which saw a little-known assemblymember vault into the national spotlight after Silicon Valley put a target on his back — only to narrowly lose his primary to another assemblymember who is also hostile to the tech sector. He gave up his seat in the Assembly to run for Congress, and his term officially ends on Jan. 1, 2027. But even as he plots next steps, Bores is actively working to help other legislators chart a path on AI regulation.

In a statement, Jesse Hunt, a spokesperson for Leading the Future — the tech-backed super PAC network that spent $8 million against Bores — did not directly address the notion that Bores has gained sway over AI policymaking in the states despite his defeat.

“Our record of success in races across the country reflects the public’s desire for elected officials to advance responsible AI policy that protects workers, children, and communities while fostering the innovation needed to unlock AI’s enormous economic potential,” said Hunt. “We believe Congress is the best place to achieve those goals.”

In an interview with POLITICO on the sidelines of the conference, Bores acknowledged his popularity among legislators looking to set guardrails on AI. He credited the phenomenon in part to the Silicon Valley billionaires who inadvertently raised his profile.

“Spending $8 million is not comfortable, and perhaps without it I might’ve won,” said Bores, who represents parts of Manhattan in the Assembly. “But certainly if you look at the projections of where I was supposed to be at the start of the race and how quickly I shot to the top, I think some portion of that was having the right enemies.”

“They won this race, but it’s going to prove to be a real Pyrrhic victory,” Bores added.

‘That message did resonate’

Bores’ new role comes at a critical moment in the nationwide push to regulate AI.

As Congress stalls on new AI laws and the White House swings wildly between permissive and restrictive plans for the technology, states such as California, New York and Illinois have stepped into the gap. Now legislators in states as far afield as Massachusetts, Utah and Maryland are picking up the baton — and looking to learn lessons from Bores’ role in authoring New York state’s RAISE Act.

The law, which Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed late last year, imposes safety and transparency rules on top AI developers and has informed similar regulatory pushes in Illinois and elsewhere. It has even been embraced by OpenAI, one of the nation’s premier AI companies, whose lobbyists are urging state legislators to align new safety rules with RAISE.

But the law also drew a fierce Silicon Valley backlash late last year, when Leading the Future accused Bores of undermining the United States’ AI edge over China. The pro-tech group vowed to spend millions of dollars to defeat him in the primary to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler — and warned it would similarly target other “candidates in states across the country who play political games with the future of American leadership.”

The campaign that followed became a bitter and expensive proxy fight between competing factions of the AI industry — with OpenAI President Greg Brockman, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and other deep-pocketed tech donors funding Leading the Future’s push for fewer regulations.

Despite Bores’ 4-point primary loss to fellow Assemblymember Micah Lasher — who also favors tighter rules on AI — evidence has continued to emerge that the industry effort to make an example of him backfired.

The fight turned Bores into an “avatar for the AI safety movement,” said Riki Parikh, policy director at the Alliance for Secure AI and one of the dozens of tech regulation supporters who packed the Chicago conference. He said he and his colleagues regularly invoked Bores as they urged state legislators to take the lead on AI rules.

“We pointed to him as an example of something that you could do, or maybe just take what he did and do it in your state,” Parikh said. “We were sort of pushing him as a model.”

Even some opponents of onerous regulations acknowledged that Bores’ willingness to challenge the AI industry probably helped him close the gap in June’s primary.

“That message did resonate,” said Jeremy Kudon, executive director of the American Innovators Network, an AI industry group backed by the venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator that supports light rules on the technology. “It didn’t get him past the goal line, but it got him closer to it.”

‘I was talking to Alex Bores the other day’

Kudon, whose lobbyists also attended the state legislative conference in Chicago, said he’s not sure that Bores’ adversarial approach to the AI sector would play as well in red states like Florida or Texas.

But Utah Republican state Rep. Doug Fiefia — whose recent push to regulate AI sparked pushback from both industry and the White House — drew an explicit link between his own experience and what happened to Bores.

“Sadly, we’re seeing a lot of influence from Big Tech in state elections. I hope we see less of it, but I think they continue to weigh in — especially on people like me or Alex Bores or others who are leading on tech regulation,” Fiefia said in an interview. Fiefia, who beat an incumbent backed by Leading the Future in a state Senate primary late last month, said he plans to press forward with bills next session that would rein in the AI industry.

Safety advocates, researchers and other state lawmakers mobbed Bores at the Chicago summit, both in the three-day conference itself and at happy hours. He seemed to be everywhere, including sitting front and center during a daylong meeting of the NCSL’s AI task force.

“I was talking to Alex Bores the other day,” said Katie Fry Hester, a Democratic state senator from Maryland who is working to send more money to her state’s cash-strapped attorney general for the enforcement of data privacy and kids’ online safety protections. In an interview with POLITICO, she said she was intrigued by a provision in Bores’ RAISE Act that funds the new regulations through fees on the largest AI developers.

“So I’m like, why not have both the large language models and the data brokers support the same office [in Maryland], and then we can enforce privacy [rules] on both?” she said.

Billen, from Encode AI, said state legislators hoping to raise their profile by taking on the tech sector increasingly look to Bores as a template.

“It's not like there's some training camp they go to where you learn how to successfully run a bill on tech regulation. Everyone is figuring it out from scratch. Most of them don't have any staff,” said Billen. “So when they see this example in someone who took on this big fight and got the bill done, and then built this national brand off of it, that becomes something that they want to emulate.”

Jacqui Irwin, a member of California’s Assembly and the Democratic nominee for her state’s 26th Congressional District, has years of experience tussling with the AI sector. Her bill requiring AI companies to disclose details about their training data, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2024, is being challenged in court by Elon Musk’s xAI.

But even Irwin believes she has something to learn from Bores’ recent fight with the AI industry.

“He was sitting at my table and we exchanged numbers. I'm going to talk to him,” said Irwin, who spoke with POLITICO soon after she had met briefly with Bores in Chicago.

Irwin said it was “interesting to see that the bill that he was attacked on” was very similar to a California law drafted by Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener and approved by Newsom just a few months before RAISE became law in New York.

“I think it was a very good starting point, so it is interesting to see what happened with Alex,” she said. “But you had different AI money protecting him and then going after him.”

‘I want to continue to play the role’

The California Democrat was referring to the flood of AI industry dollars that — somewhat confusingly — also went to support Bores’ House primary campaign. Most of that money came from Public First Action, a super PAC network with close ties to Anthropic, a leading AI company and archrival to OpenAI that backs tough rules on the technology. Public First ultimately spent $12 million to support Bores, significantly more than the $8 million that Leading the Future spent against his candidacy.

Leading the Future’s top officials say it was Bores’ ties to Anthropic — which they accuse of running a sophisticated campaign to capture government regulators — that made them go all-in on his defeat. Bores dismisses the charge as an elaborate conspiracy theory.

“They're the ones with the grand plan,” he said. “They created Leading the Future before there was even a congressional race, before Jerry [Nadler] stepped down. Three weeks after I declared, they named me the number one enemy in the country. Two weeks after that they said they would spend at least $10 million against me, a promise they ultimately mostly fulfilled. None of the other groups that ended up supporting me had even been created yet.”

Despite Bores’ willingness to discuss AI regulation with state legislators — and pretty much anyone else who would listen — in Chicago, he was cagey about his plans after leaving office. But he strongly suggested he would continue to play a central role in the AI safety movement.

“We have people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put their profit over our safety and well-being,” Bores said. “And I want to continue to play the role in organizing around that, and making sure that it's actually Americans’ voices that are heard in dictating how this goes forward.”