By Maggie Severns and Amrith Ramkumar | Photography by Joe Carrotta for WSJ
More than 100 people crowded into a bar on a chilly Saturday evening on Manhattan's west side to draw up battle plans for a brewing national showdown over artificial-intelligence policy.
Their leader is Alex Bores, a 35-year-old computer scientist and New York state assemblyman who is running to represent a congressional district that covers much of Manhattan. Until recently, he was considered a long shot in a June Democratic primary with a dozen candidates, including anti-Trump lawyer George Conway and Jack Schlossberg, grandson of John F. Kennedy.
That was before a big AI political-action committee decided to spend millions of dollars opposing him.
Now, Bores's dad regularly receives negative fliers about him in his mailbox. Neighbors ask him in the elevator about anti-Bores texts they've received. He even spotted his own face on TV through the window of a nearby deli -- in an attack ad by a pro-AI PAC.
AI companies have plunged into the election-influence game. Borrowing from the playbook of the largest cryptocurrency super PAC, which spent nearly $200 million to boost allies and punish opponents in the 2024 elections, AI companies have pledged about $265 million for super PACs and similar groups ahead of this year's midterm elections. Crypto's big 2024 bet paid off, with President Trump rolling back regulatory actions and Congress passing an industry-friendly law last year.
The Bores campaign is shaping up as a test case for the super PAC trying to send a message: If a lawmaker pursues safety standards that aren't supported by industry giants such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, it doesn't matter how obscure they are, they will have to face the industry's wrath.
Bores, who is young and relatively unknown to voters, has faced $2 million in attack ads thus far, raising his profile in the crowded field. He launched his campaign with a focus on affordability, but had sponsored an AI safety bill that was signed into law by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul last year.
His bill tackled a few of the myriad questions about how the government should oversee rapidly advancing AI, such as requiring companies to publish safety protocols explaining how they curb their tech's ability to create bioweapons or carry out crimes. Other states are tackling questions such as whether AI companies can be held liable if software screening job applicants discriminates against women or minorities.
"At stake is whether the U.S. government is going to miss the boat on AI as badly as we missed it on social media, or if Americans are going to have a say in the most consequential technology of their lifetimes," Bores said in an interview.
Standing on a bistro chair in the crowded Manhattan bar, Bores urged supporters to treat the fight in his district as a fight for the country. "They want to win a race, and then go to every single member of Congress and say, 'If you dare to regulate AI, we are going to come in and spend $10 million against you.' "
The super PAC behind the anti-Bores campaign, Leading the Future, said it hasn't earmarked $10 million to spend against Bores, but that it is amassing a $125 million war chest overall, mostly from a top executive at OpenAI and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The group aims to fight regulations they say will strangle AI. Meta Platforms, which now describes itself as an AI company, has seeded multiple PACs with $65 million.
"We want the national regulation most voters support," said Josh Vlasto, one of Leading the Future's co-heads. "They want the state regulation that would slow everything down and create this patchwork."
That super PAC is spending money on House primary runoffs in Texas, the battle to replace Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia and the Florida governor's race, hoping to stave off AI backlash among MAGA Republicans. It also is monitoring AI bills in states including Utah, with an eye on future targets, Vlasto said. Favored candidates won their recent primaries in Texas, North Carolina and Illinois, although Jesse Jackson Jr., son of the famous civil-rights activist, lost his primary in Illinois after getting money from the PAC.
The industry's spending binge is colliding with mounting voter concerns about energy use by AI data centers and the potential for widespread job losses. In recent months, several state legislatures have blocked new data centers from being built after pressure from residents.
Bores's bar gathering in Manhattan drew a crowd of college students and recent graduates who expressed concern about AI wiping out entry-level jobs and putting their generation at a disadvantage.
"It seems like Alex is one of the only candidates -- if not the only candidate -- who are taking these issues seriously," said one campaign volunteer, Columbia University senior Elliot Gross, who signed up to hand out campaign fliers on the street.
Joshua Friedberg, a 22-year-old recent college graduate, said he first met Bores when a friend brought him to a fundraiser. Two days later, he attended another Bores event to sign up as a volunteer.
One of Bores's state-assembly aides, Julie Roland, said she was inspired to work for him after seeing how AI capabilities had jumped from barely doing math when she started law school to drafting briefs by the time she was done.
Legislative battle
This year's political battle has roots in a titanic business clash. The AI industry has argued that bills like Bores's make progress burdensome and set the U.S. behind in the race for global advancement.
Leading the Future co-head Vlasto said a Federal Election Commission filing released in January, which showed that employees of AI company Anthropic had given nearly $130,000 to Bores's campaign the day it launched in October, validated the super PAC's strategy to target him. Anthropic has staked its business on being "pro-regulation" and responsible in how it manages AI, an approach that has put it in conflict with the Trump administration.
Vlasto, a former aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, saw the donations as proof that Bores was secretly allied with the Anthropic-led "doomer" wing of the industry, which backs increased government involvement that could slow the development of powerful AI tools. To proponents of lightly regulated AI, whose point of view has been embraced by Trump, speed is essential as the U.S. races to develop new technology faster than China.
Vlasto said the first person listed on Bores's donor filings was an employee at the data-analysis firm Palantir, which has been criticized for its contracts with Immigration and Custom Enforcement. Bores used to work at Palantir as a data scientist, and Vlasto's group devoted much of its campaign against him to highlighting that link.
"He made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE," said one TV ad that aired in New York City. "Bores is a hypocrite on ICE," said another ad on Instagram. The local Chelsea News ran a full-page print ad showing Bores scowling next to the phrase: "ICE ICE BORES."
Bores said he quit Palantir in part because of its contracts with ICE, and has attended anti-ICE rallies.
Vlasto lives in the Manhattan district Bores is running in, and became known for a combative approach to dealing with the New York press corps when working for Cuomo in the early 2010s. He later advised Cuomo when the former governor was accused of sexual harassment.
In 2023, he became a media strategist and spokesman for the crypto super PAC Fairshake. The group successfully backed winners or opposed losers in about 85% of the races it spent money on in 2024. He is taking the same approach to AI. "I'd much prefer the carrot, but I'm not afraid of the stick," he said.
Leading the Future says Bores and Anthropic are part of a network of so-called effective altruists that has poured money into left-leaning nonprofits and efforts to promote AI regulations.
The super PAC and its allies say fears of AI running amok are exaggerated and regulations being proposed would slow the U.S. Existing laws, they say, already make it illegal to create a bioweapon or conduct other nefarious activities. They contend Anthropic is pushing for rules that would benefit it and hurt competitors.
Anthropic has said it isn't a company of effective altruists and isn't political, and that the policies it supports are best for AI development.
Hamza Chaudhry, who leads AI and national-security work at the Future of Life Institute, which advocates for AI guardrails, said he is troubled by the industry's big political spending. "There will be a dark figure here of electoral pressure that goes past what we will ever know," Chaudhry said.
In February, Anthrophic pledged $20 million for Public First Action, a group opposing Leading the Future. It hopes to raise $75 million initially and recently said it would spend $450,000 on ads supporting Bores. The group spent about $1.6 million backing North Carolina Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee, who recently won a tight primary.
Lobbying campaign
The AI industry is flooding Washington with cash. Last year, one in four federal lobbyists pitched lawmakers on AI policy, data centers or autonomous vehicles, according to an analysis by the government watchdog group Public Citizen. Meta and seven other big tech companies collectively spent $71 million lobbying last year. That amounts to some $330,000 per day that Congress was in session, according to Issue One, an organization that advocates reducing money in politics.
Congress has shown little appetite to pass laws that tackle potential AI harms, making New York and California critical influence battlegrounds. In New York, following a lobbying campaign by Meta, Google and others, Hochul tweaked Bores's bill to make fines and transparency requirements less onerous and mirror California's legislation.
As California debated AI safety bills, tech companies retained some political insiders to help make their case: OpenAI retained former U.S. Sen. Laphonza Butler and Ann O'Leary, former chief of staff to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Amazon and others brought in the former leader of the state assembly, Bob Hertzberg.
After Newsom vetoed the state legislature's initial attempt to pass an AI bill, the influx of lobbyists helped big tech strike a fresh deal with lawmakers that Newsom signed in late 2025.
Negotiations are getting heated elsewhere. Colorado in 2024 passed one of the country's first bills creating consumer protections, such as preventing AI models from disqualifying job applicants based on race or gender, but it has yet to go into effect. AI companies have argued extensively for revisions.
Colorado chose to delay the law's start date until mid-2026. "We either regulate or we roll the dice on what happens next," said state Rep. Brianna Titone, a sponsor of the original bill.
Bores plunged into the Manhattan congressional race after three years in the state assembly, where his chief achievement was shepherding the AI bill. Two weeks after his first child was born, he heard longtime Rep. Jerrold Nadler was retiring. He decided to run.
According to the lone public poll in the race, Kennedy family scion Jack Schlossberg, who is endorsed by former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, currently has the lead. Micah Lasher, a Nadler protégée who also worked for ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is also considered a strong contender.
In January, Bores announced he had raised more than $2 million.
Veteran New York strategist Hank Sheinkopf said the attack ads by the AI industry have helped him break through. The PACs, he said, "have made Bores, in some ways, the most significant figure in the race."
Write to Maggie Severns at maggie.severns@wsj.com and Amrith Ramkumar at amrith.ramkumar@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 19, 2026 21:00 ET (01:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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