AI Political Spending Floods New York Congressional Primary as Tech Giants Battle Over Regulation

AI Super PAC's First Major Target Loses New York Congressional Primary

The increasingly powerful AI lobby poured millions of dollars into a campaign against a congressional candidate running in the Democratic primaries in New York. On Tuesday, they got what they paid for. Outside groups spent more than $40 million on the race to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler's seat in the 12th congressional district in Manhattan. Among the eight candidates running, most of that money was spent on assemblymember Alex Bores, a divisive figure for Silicon Valley who has become the poster child for tougher AI regulation. Bores lost the Democratic primary to fellow assemblymember Micah Lasher, with whom it seemed like he was in a head-to-head race in prior polls. Bores ran on the platform of keeping big tech accountable by gunning for federal-level AI regulation, including through an AI Dividend program that would pay Americans who fall victim to AI-driven job displacement. What first put him on the tech industry's radar was the RAISE Act, a landmark AI safety bill he sponsored in the New York State Assembly that would require leading AI companies to develop, publish, and adhere to formal safety protocols. Shortly after he announced his candidacy, Bores found himself at the center of attacks from Leading the Future, a super PAC backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and AI search engine company Perplexity. Leading the Future spent $8 million to make sure Bores did not win the primaries. But for all in the tech world that fought against Bores' candidacy, there was also sizable support for him. A combination of super PACs and AI safety groups spent roughly $20 million to support Bores, with the bulk of that money coming from an organization backed by Anthropic. Other major PACs that supported Bores were Dream NYC, backed by Anthropic AI safety researcher Daniel Ziegler, and You Can Push Back, backed by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen. Suddenly, the race was at the epicenter of an industry-wide civil war. On one side, supporters of stricter federal AI regulation claimed the industry was underestimating or underselling the dangers of underregulated AI development in pursuit of wider profit margins. On the other side, critics claimed strict regulation would hinder innovation, causing the U.S. to lose a global AI race to China, while labeling the opposing view as fearmongering that conceals an attempt at regulatory capture. Public sentiment against AI and the unprecedented data center buildout has been souring rapidly over the past year as the negative impacts of the technology, from AI psychosis to the strain AI data centers put on the power grid, gain more recognition. The NY-12 race was widely viewed as the first major political litmus test on AI. "Though we've come up short tonight, the example set here was not the one AI oligarchs intended," Bores said in a statement following the defeat. "They set out to make people afraid to stand up to them. Instead, they learned just how ready people are to push back." Bores's loss does not necessarily mean that more support for stricter federal AI regulation in Congress is off the table. Though Leading the Future campaigned against Bores, it did not explicitly endorse any other candidate in the race. The candidate who did end up winning the primary and is heavily favored to win the seat in November, New York state assemblymember Micah Lasher, was also a co-sponsor of Bores' RAISE Act, the same bill that disturbed the AI industry and brought Bores into the national spotlight. "I have some news for the two big AI companies that have taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat," Lasher said following his win last night. "I won't be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, and our environment.

Big tech spent millions on a single US congressional race. It won't be the last time

Pro- and anti-AI groups spent $24m on a congressional contest in New York, but it's unclear to what end When the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district was called on Tuesday night, the result capped off one of the most expensive races of its kind in the state's history. More than $24m poured into the Manhattan contest from tech-backed financial groups as the campaign turned into a battleground for pro- and anti-AI groups to test their influence. Much of the spending targeted candidate Alex Bores, a member of the state assembly who sponsored an AI safety bill and subsequently became a lightning rod for the tech industry. Pro-AI political action committees (Pacs) put more than $8m into the race to oppose Bores, according to Tech Influence Watch, while industry groups supporting regulation spent more than $16m to counter the attacks. Bores ultimately wound up in second place, losing to Michael Lasher, who had the backing of NY-12's outgoing representative, Jerry Nadler, and deeper ties to the Democratic party establishment. Despite the tech industry's focus on Bores, Lasher also co-sponsored the same Raise Act AI safety bill, and similarly called for big tech to be reined in. Exactly how the exorbitant amount of tech money shaped the race is hard to determine in a crowded primary that also included Kennedy family scion Jack Schlossberg, who finished a distant third, and former Republican turned anti-Trump influencer George Conway. What is clearer is that NY-12 shows how the AI industry is likely to descend upon campaigns this year, as November's midterm elections approach, and tech-backed Super Pacs - committees that can raise and spend unlimited funds in favor or against candidates - amass hundreds of millions of dollars. Many of the groups that spent money on Bores are well equipped to replicate their influence campaigns in other races. Leading the Future, which opposed Bores and is funded by OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, along with venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has this year raised more than $75m. Public First Action, which is more supportive of AI regulation, meanwhile received more than $20m from Anthropic. Individual tech moguls have also positioned themselves to be exceedingly influential, with Elon Musk funneling money into his America Pac, and California crypto billionaire Chris Larsen putting millions into the newly created You Can Push Back Super Pac. (Larsen put $3.5m into backing Bores.) In NY-12, the most visible effect of this AI industry funding was a flood of often misleading attack ads that put tech, and the backlash to AI, at the center of the race. The Jobs and Democracy Pac bought an ad in support of Bores that ran as the front page of the New York Daily News, mimicking a genuine news page and drawing the ire of the newsroom's union. Several ads against Bores, backed by pro-tech funding, meanwhile framed him as a hypocrite due to his past work at the surveillance company Palantir. "He's got a master's in computer science, but he's an expert in hypocrisy," one of Leading the Future's ads declared. "He made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE, enabling ICE, and powering their deportations while making bank". Bores, who claimed to have left Palantir over its work with ICE, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Pac and alleged it made false statements against him. Groups supporting Bores meanwhile argued the tactics may have also raised his profile and made the debate around AI regulation more prominent, even after their candidate's defeat. "Voters want leaders who stand up to big tech and who support commonsense safeguards," former representative Brad Carson, the founder of the Jobs and Democracy PAC, which is funded by Public Action First, said in a statement. Lasher's victory speech also highlighted that while candidates may wind up courting tech donations, they also have to be careful of being seen as too close to an increasingly disliked industry. "I have some news for the two big AI companies who've taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat," Lasher said. "I won't be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, our environment."

AI money gets an early test at the ballot box

Why it matters: AI money is now a significant part of the election landscape. * Industry-backed groups have spent the last year raising hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the political debate around AI -- and in the process, made the technology a more visible issue for voters. * Leading the Future, a pro-AI industry super PAC backed by tech execs and investors pushing rapid AI development and lighter regulation, has raised over $100 million and thrown its weight behind nearly 30 races so far. * Tuesday's results offered an early glimpse of how fights over AI regulation, data centers and the industry's influence could reverberate on the campaign trail. New York: Pro-AI safety candidate Alex Bores lost out to fellow Democrat Micah Lasher in a heavily-watched, expensive race. But this isn't a simple tale of AI super PAC money yielding results, nor a sign that future candidates will cower from pro-AI safety stances. * Bores, running to replace Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), grew to national prominence as the top target of Leading the Future, turning the primary into the highest-profile AI fight in the country. * Lasher co-sponsored New York's sweeping AI safety bill, the RAISE Act, and supports a data center buildout moratorium. What they're saying: Bores was polling in the single digits before Leading the Future got involved in the race, Encode AI general counsel Nathan Calvin told Axios. * "The backlash from their push elevated Bores to within a few thousand votes of a congressional seat," Calvin said. * Asked for comment on Bores' loss, Leading the Future co-founder Josh Vlasto said the organization would continue backing candidates who support a national AI regulatory framework "with strong and smart guardrails." * Calvin said the most telling part of LTF's response was what it didn't say: "Perhaps the most remarkable sign, though, is Leading the Future themselves refraining from saying a word celebrating Bores's loss, I think they know they were not responsible for it." Utah: Republican Doug Fiefia won election to the Utah state Senate after spending months publicly defiant on AI safety issues that put him at odds with the Trump administration. * The White House earlier this year pressured Fiefia to drop his AI transparency bill, an early target of the administration's campaign against state-level AI regulation. * But the lawmaker leaned into calling out AI super PAC and tech oligarch money in his election, and said he plans to continue pursuing AI policy in the state Senate. * "The chamber may change, but the issues and my focus won't," he said. "The Senate gives me a larger opportunity to keep working on the issues I've been focused on from day one." Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah)'s victory over state legislator Karianne Lisonbee, meanwhile, highlighted how data centers have emerged as a crucial political issue in their own right. * Lisonbee sought to make Moore's position on the proposed Stratos data center project a central issue in the race. The project, backed by businessman and TV personality Kevin O'Leary, has become a flashpoint in the state over its size and water demands. * Moore did not directly oppose the project, instead emphasizing the national security importance of data centers and calling for local communities to have a seat at the table for water and other resource management. The bottom line: AI money is reshaping the campaign landscape, but this week's results suggest that challenging the industry isn't proving politically toxic.

The AI industry just won a race -- but lost the war

Eric Levitz is a senior correspondent at Vox. He covers a wide range of political and policy issues with a special focus on questions that internally divide the American left and right. Before coming to Vox in 2024, he wrote a column on politics and economics for New York Magazine. New York's congressional primaries on Tuesday were supposed to be the moment AI's top backers definitively proved they could bend US politics to their will. Instead, they left behind a muddy stalemate that only raises more questions about whether their spending can keep pace with an anti-AI backlash. The stage for the battle was set last year, when some of America's leading tech investors launched a new, $100 million super PAC dedicated to electing candidates who were "aligned with the pro-AI agenda" and defeating those who weren't. Months later, this group -- dubbed Leading the Future (LTF) -- named its first target: New York Assembly member Alex Bores. Bores had been the chief sponsor of the Empire State's "RAISE Act," which required developers of frontier AI models to follow various safety protocols or face steep fines. LTF fiercely opposed that bill. Thus, when Bores launched a congressional run, the super PAC sought to teach him -- and his fellow Democrats -- a lesson: Purse sweeping AI regulations and your next campaign will drown in a flood of opposition spending. At first glance, it may look like LTF just achieved that objective. Bores lost his bid on Tuesday night to represent New York's 12th District. Headlines deemed the race a victory for "Big Tech." But appearances can be deceiving. In truth, Silicon Valley's libertarians are losing the fight over AI regulation -- and the NY-12 race only underscores this reality. Contrary to LTF's hopes, Bores's loss is unlikely to dissuade Democrats from backing far-reaching regulations on AI, for at least four reasons: First, the race's winner, Assembly member Micah Lasher, is about as hostile to LTF's vision as Bores was. Lasher co-sponsored the RAISE Act and campaigned on pausing data center construction nationwide, launching antitrust investigations into the major AI labs, protecting artists from "AI-driven copyright infringement," prioritizing organized labor's interests in debates over AI deployment, and myriad other regulatory constraints on the technology. In his victory speech, Lasher directly addressed the AI companies who took an "unusual interest" in the race, saying he "won't be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs and our families." Simply put, if the tech industry wants to convince Democrats that backing strict AI regulations is politically self-defeating, they'll need better evidence than a race won by...a Democrat who backs strict AI regulations. Second, it's far from clear that Bores's candidacy was actually hurt by industry opposition. As my former Vox colleague Kelsey Piper notes at The Argument, when LTF announced it was targeting Bores, betting markets gave him only a 10 percent chance of victory, placing him behind both Lasher and Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg. Bores ultimately came in a close second, trailing Lasher by only 4 percentage points (or about 4,000 votes). It's plausible that LTF unintentionally aided Bores's rise to contention by validating his bonafides as the bane of Big Tech. Certainly, that identity earned the assembly member abundant media coverage. "For voters, tech billionaires spending millions to beat a state legislator wasn't a flex; it was a tell," Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who advised the Bores campaign, told me. Third -- and related -- the race ended up becoming a fight between AI companies, not just about them. Bores's candidacy was not solely powered by a grassroots backlash to industry meddling. Rather, he was himself the recipient of massive Silicon Valley donations, albeit from the segment of the tech industry that worries about AI safety. Anthropic, the maker of the cha6bot Claude, was an enthusiastic supporter of the RAISE Act. And when LTF came for that law's chief sponsor, the AI giant's super PAC rallied to his support, supplying Bores with at least $11 million in outside funding. The crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, meanwhile, tossed another $19 million Bores's way. Importantly, this flood of financing was a reaction to LTF's intervention. In other words, by targeting Bores, the super PAC arguably made it easier for him to raise money -- and highlighted the existence of a pro-regulation, tech industry donor network. It is hard to see how this will make Democrats more afraid to meddle with AI. Finally, Lasher's victory probably didn't have that much to do with artificial intelligence, one way or another. Lasher has been involved in New York politics for about a quarter century longer than Bores has, and boasts personal ties to Michael Bloomberg, Kathy Hochul, and other power players in the state's Democratic Party. He was the race's favorite for more or less the entirety of the race. Therefore, even if Lasher favored light-touch AI regulation, his narrow victory over Bores wouldn't prove much. Given his actual positions on AI, his win does nothing to advance LTF's argument. Meanwhile, since Leading the Future launched last year, the national political climate has turned sharply against them. In a recent Fox News poll, 80 percent of respondents said they favored regulating AI to protect public interests, even if doing so slows innovation. Other surveys show a large majority of Americans opposing the construction of new data centers in their areas. By itself, public opinion might not be an insuperable obstacle to Big Tech libertarians' agenda. Voters are increasingly skeptical of AI, but still don't typically consider it a top priority. Yet the national security state is also turning against laissez-faire in the AI sector. And its will is harder to ignore. Amid growing concerns about AI's capacity to aid cybercrime, the White House released an executive order earlier this month encouraging labs to seek the government's approval before releasing new models. Weeks later, the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of essentially ordering Anthropic to remove its Fable model from the market, on national security grounds. This represented a more radical and capricious government intrusion into the AI industry than Bores's signature law ever contemplated. Leading the Future knows that the ground has shifted beneath its feet. When it first announced its targeting of Bores, it lambasted the RAISE Act as 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." Last month, however, the super PAC announced that it actually supported the RAISE Act, as the law "gets the combination of innovation and safety right." LTF reconciled these positions by insisting that, while Bores's initial draft of the legislation was ruinous, the final version was excellent. This is unconvincing. It's true that the RAISE Act got watered down before enactment. But the idea that these changes were large enough to transform the bill from an act of catastrophic national sabotage -- into a model of pro-innovation lawmaking -- is implausible. And LTF's supposed support for the measure is belied by the months it spent vigorously lobbying the federal government to preempt New York's law. In reality, the group has simply retreated in the face of shifting political winds. Silicon Valley's proponents of light-touch AI regulation are losing. And Bores's loss did nothing to change that.

New York Democrat Micah Lasher wins House primary that drew big spending from AI groups

New York Assemblyman Micah Lasher emerged from a crowded Democratic primary in New York's 12th Congressional District.Lev Radin / ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters New York Assemblyman Micah Lasher has won the Democratic nomination in the 12th Congressional District, NBC News projects, benefitting from his deep ties to the area and backing from party leaders in a primary that garnered national attention. Lasher emerged from a crowded field of Democrats that included fellow Assemblyman Alex Bores, Kennedy family scion Jack Schlossberg and George Conway, the former Republican lawyer turned prominent critic of President Donald Trump. Bores' campaign was defined by a fight over AI regulation, with tech titans on both sides of the issues spending large sums of money both for and against his candidacy. But Lasher managed to sidestep that proxy war and had the backing of major state party leaders including Gov. Kathy Hochul, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg -- who remains popular in the Manhattan district where older voters play an outsized role in elections -- and retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler, who currently represents it. Lasher has worked for all three of those leaders. He leaned heavily on his legislative record, framed himself as a decades-long fighter for the district. Lasher is also a vocal proponent of redrawing New York's congressional map to boost Democrats amid the national redistricting fight, boosting him with the party's base. An allied group, funded primarily by millions of dollars from Bloomberg, also spent heavily to emphasize Lasher's endorsements and bolster his Democratic credentials on issues like fighting the Trump administration's immigration policies. But the battle between warring AI factions sucked up much of the oxygen in the race, all in response to Bores' push for more restrictions on the industry. Think Big, a super PAC affiliated with the pro-AI group Leading the Future, has spent at least $8 million against Bores. The top funders of Leading the Future include leaders at the company OpenAI and aligned venture capitalists, and the group has been critical of Bores' views on AI regulation, arguing his regulatory framework would "handcuff" innovation. Bores argued new safeguards are needed now before the rapid development of AI platforms reaches a point of no return. And he received a boost from a competing AI company, Anthropic, which has supported a different super PAC, Jobs and Democracy PAC, that's spent almost $7 million to defend him. Schlossberg, the grandson of John F. Kennedy, finished a distant third in the primary. He was endorsed by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as he made his first bid for public office. Lasher will be heavily favored in the November general election for the deep-blue seat.

The AI Industry Successfully Defeats Its No. 1 Target

State Assemblyman Micah Lasher was projected to win the Democratic primary for New York's 12th Congressional District in Manhattan, a major win for AI industry groups that had targeted his leading opponent. Lasher's victory over Alex Bores, another assemblyman, came after an industry-funded super PAC pushing against AI regulations spent $8 million attacking Bores. While attributing the win entirely to the AI industry is an oversimplification, its success here is likely to scare many mainstream Democrats away from aggressively confronting it. Lasher, who had the backing of retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Kathy Hochul, also benefited from $10 million in spending from a Bloomberg-backed super PAC. The district, which covers Midtown and upper Manhattan, is heavily Democratic. Both Bores and Lasher ran as mainstream liberals and generally outpaced two candidates who brought more celebrity to the race: Kennedy family member Jack Schlossberg and lawyer George Conway, the ex-husband of Trump aide Kellyanne Conway and a leading figure in the Never Trump movement of former Republicans. But the race ended up as a battle between two opposing wings of the AI industry. The group Leading The Future, which attacked Bores, is closely aligned with the White House, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI, and supports a laissez-faire approach to regulating the powerful technology. The second group, which is more closely aligned with Anthropic and many leading AI researchers, is focused on the potential long-term and existential risks associated with the technology. They formed super PACs to back Bores, ultimately spending more than $10 million to help him. Bores, a 35-year-old data scientist, became a flashpoint in the debate after authoring the RAISE Act, a state-level law regulating the most advanced AI technologies. Leading The Future, which insists only the federal government should regulate AI, made him their first target.