AI companies are spending millions to thwart this former tech exec’s congressional bid | Tech Crunch

Overview

If you’ve seen the recent ads attacking New York assembly member Alex Bores, you’ll know he used to work for Palantir, the AI company that’s powering the controversial raids and high-volume deportation efforts from U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The ads even accuse Bores of having made hundreds of thousands of dollars building the tech for ICE and “powering their deportations.”

But that’s not quite the whole story. “I quit Palantir specifically over its work with ICE in 2019,” Bores told Tech Crunch on last week’s episode of Equity.

Details

Now he’s running for New York’s 12th congressional district, with Big Tech billionaires funding outside groups targeting his campaign.

The ads are funded by a super PAC called Leading the Future, which, ironically, has the backing of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, as well as Open AI President Greg Brockman, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI search startup Perplexity, and other Silicon Valley heavy-hitters. The PAC has raised $125 million to go after candidates in state elections that are introducing AI legislation and to support candidates with a light-to-no-touch approach to regulating AI.

“They have committed to spending at least $10 million against me…because they know I am their biggest threat in their quest for unbridled control over the American worker, over our kids’ minds, climate and our utility bills,” Bores said. “They’re targeting me to make an example of me.”

He said his background working in tech, including at Palantir and several startups, is exactly why Leading the Future made him its first target.

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“I actually deeply understand the technology and I can’t be dismissed as this person just doesn’t understand it,” Bores said, adding that if elected, he would be only the second Democrat in Congress with a computer science degree.

Bores incurred the ire of Silicon Valley after sponsoring the RAISE Act, an AI transparency bill that was signed into law in December. The law requires large AI labs — specifically those making more than $500 million in revenue — to have a publicly available safety plan in place, to stick to it, and to report when a catastrophic safety incident has occurred.

It’s the sort of light-touch law that other industries might kill for — more disclosure and planning than proactive oversight.

Bores says he doesn’t believe Leading the Future wants to see any AI regulation, unless, as the PAC has said, it’s at the federal level. Over the last year, states have been fighting against industry to protect their rights to regulate AI in the absence of a federal standard. In December, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to challenge “onerous” state AI laws, like Bores’s RAISE Act.

Bores pointed to his campaign’s proposed national AI governance blueprint — spanning eight issue areas and 43 policy recommendations — adding that anyone serious about federal AI regulation should be supporting him.  He has also introduced legislation that would force companies to disclose what goes into their training data and to embed metadata standards that would make synthetic content easier to trace.

Leading the Future isn’t the only Silicon Valley-backed PAC getting involved in the midterms. Meta has put

“This is not a ‘We want to have a piece of the conversation,’” Bores said. “This is: ‘We want to intimidate elected officials and browbeat anyone who doesn’t agree with us.”

“The average assembly race in New York raises maybe

For his part, Bores has garnered the support of a separate Anthropic-backed PAC called Public First Action, which is spending $450,000 on the New Yorker. Public First Action also describes itself as pro-AI, but with a focus on transparency, safety, and public oversight.

Leading the Future, he says, represents “an extremely small minority of voices” who see any regulation as a threat to AI progress and who just “want to let it rip.” Among Bores’s base of supporters are tech workers at the very firms whose leaders want to thwart his campaign — a part of a broader pattern of grassroots organizing inside tech companies over how AI is deployed and who it serves.

On the other end of the spectrum are the minority of people who “want to pretend AI never existed and put the genie back in the bottle and burn all the data centers,” Bores said.

He thinks most Americans are somewhere in the middle: they use AI and see its potential but are concerned at how fast it’s moving.

“[They] wonder if the government is up to the task of ensuring we have a future that benefits the many instead of the few,” Bores said.

Key Takeaways

• If you’ve seen the recent ads attacking New York assembly member Alex Bores, you’ll know he used to work for Palantir, the AI company that’s powering the controversial raids and high-volume deportation efforts from U
• But that’s not quite the whole story
• Now he’s running for New York’s 12th congressional district, with Big Tech billionaires funding outside groups targeting his campaign
• The ads are funded by a super PAC called Leading the Future, which, ironically, has the backing of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, as well as Open AI President Greg Brockman, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI search startup Perplexity, and other Silicon Valley heavy-hitters
• “They have committed to spending at least $10 million against me…because they know I am their biggest threat in their quest for unbridled control over the American worker, over our kids’ minds, climate and our utility bills,” Bores said