On November 16, as my wife and I were getting ready to celebrate our wedding anniversary, I got an ominous call letting me know that an AI super PAC had named me their number-one enemy and pledged to spend “millions” against my campaign for Congress.
Read more How Reactionary Zionists Became the New Birchers
Three weeks later, they clarified: at least $10 million.
That super PAC is called Leading the Future. It was launched last summer with more than $100 million in backing from Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and AI search start-up Perplexity. Its founders said publicly that they want to “make an example” of me so that no politician anywhere ever again tries to put guardrails on AI.
If they succeed—if tens of millions of dollars in attack ads can take out a candidate before he ever sets foot in Congress—a chilling effect will sweep into every statehouse and every congressional office in the country. Elected officials and candidates for office will, understandably, try to avoid the issue. In fact, Democratic leadership has already told competitive candidates to steer clear of talking about AI.
But if we win, this dynamic gets turned on its head. Our victory would send a clear message to other leaders that running on these issues is viable, that the spending can be withstood, and that the industry’s intimidation campaign isn’t invincible.
That is the real wager being made in New York’s 12th Congressional District this June. Whether the cost of having a say in how AI affects our kids’ brains, our jobs, or our environment is political destruction. Whether the American people get a say in the development of AI at all.
Perhaps you’ve heard a little about our race, maybe even in this magazine. But if not, let’s start with the basics. I’m Alex Bores, a New York State Assemblyman representing a stretch of Manhattan running from the Upper East Side through Midtown. I spent nearly a decade in the tech industry before running for the State Assembly in 2022 and becoming the first Democrat elected in New York State at any level with a degree in computer science. Last year, I passed the RAISE Act, the strongest AI-safety law in the country. It requires major AI developers to disclose their safety protocols and report serious misuse of their systems, the kind of basic transparency that most industries take for granted. Despite furious pushback from the industry and a clash with Governor Kathy Hochul’s office, we won.
Now I’m running for Congress, and the same industry that lost in Albany wants to make sure I don’t bring the same plan and record of success to Washington, DC.
Their logic isn’t complicated. An elected official who has already beaten them once, who understands their playbook, and who is willing to describe plainly what they want and how to stop it is not who they want in the federal government. They don’t want someone who understands their business regulating their business, which is them telling on themselves.
More than that: A campaign like mine that succeeds becomes a model for how we can unite the Democratic Party against a common enemy and win power for the American people.
Leading the Future is spending $10 million in a single Democratic primary to prevent that from happening.
The stakes here extend way beyond politics. We are at a genuine technological and societal inflection point. Artificial intelligence is transforming the economy in ways that outpace the institutions built to govern it. Tens of millions of workers face displacement. The disruption is already here, in office buildings and hospitals and on work sites across this city. The companies developing these technologies have invested both in technology and, increasingly, in a political architecture designed to ensure that they cannot be held accountable for their actions.
At every previous moment like this one—industrialization, electrification, automation—the central question was the same: Who sets the terms? Would the gains be broadly distributed, or would they concentrate? Would workers have a voice, or would the decisions be made for them by wealthy industrialists?
We certainly did not get it perfect then, and the Trump administration is hell-bent on blunting our progress and reversing our gains. We need now, as we did during those prior periods, the kind of smart, moral legislation that protects worker power and influence on the conditions of their labor and its output.
Our mission is clear. We need to back labor unions representing the workers most exposed to the changes underway, and build up a volunteer-based ground operation for people who believe, as I do, that the only answer to organized money is organized people.
Facing similar hostility from what he called the “economic royalists” of his era, Franklin Roosevelt told a crowd at Madison Square Garden in 1936 that his opponents were unanimous in their hatred for him—and that he welcomed it. It is a political argument Democrats in 2026 need to more fully embrace: that opposition from concentrated wealth is itself a signal that something real is on the line.
Leading the Future’s spending is, in its way, a credential. And I welcome it, too.
Read more Conservation for Survival
