The AI ​​tried to bury this politician, and now people have actually heard about him

By the time the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District ends in June, Anthropic and OpenAI will have spent millions in their battle over the political future of artificial intelligence: Who will regulate it, or who will be punished for it? You try To organize it. But the real winner in their dispute may be the man they’re currently fighting over: the once-obscure New York State Assemblyman whom Streisand has influenced to become the poster child for AI safety regulation.

Since late 2025, Leading the Future, the super PAC funded by the CEOs of OpenAI, Palantir, and a16z, has spent millions against Alex Bores, who wrote one of the first pieces of AI regulatory legislation in the country. The political action committee had hoped to kill his bid for the seat that was about to be vacated by longtime Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. Instead, Boris is now the front-runner in the eight-person race to become the “Face of Manhattan.” New York The magazine recently put him on its cover.

Shockingly, he managed to achieve all this without a huge advertising campaign. In fact, Boris’ campaign said Edge It made its first ad buy in New York on May 11, nearly seven months after Boris entered the race and just weeks before the polls closed on June 23. In contrast, Lead the Future, backed by OpenAI’s Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and Greg Brockman, Attack ads against Bores have been running since December 2025spending an estimated $2.4 million according to the latest reports.

In any other situation, a super PAC backed by corporations and billionaires, which is allowed to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money for a candidate or ballot initiative as long as it does not coordinate with the campaign, might spend more than its target into oblivion. The group behind Leadership the Future has already had significant success in the 2024 election, unseating Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) via Fairshake, a cryptocurrency industry super PAC. It will certainly have the upper hand in Manhattan: last December, Leading the Future’s Think Big PAC spent $120,000 to run a single attack ad against Boris on television and digital. “Advertising in the New York primary is very expensive,” said Liz Smith, a New York-based political activist who managed Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign, and whose career has included stints with governments. Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer. “New York’s media market is the most expensive media market in the country. You’d kill for any piece of airtime.”

When Boris entered the race last October, the former Palantir employee-turned-government employee faced several other candidates with name recognition and deep-pocketed supporters. Micah Lasher, a fellow member of the New York State Assembly, has the support of Nadler’s New York political machine, as well as Mike Bloomberg’s super PAC. Jack Schlossberg, the influential grandson of John F. Kennedy, has the support of a national Democratic establishment that is nostalgic for Camelot. George Conway, a Donald Trump critic and ex-husband of former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, won over the “Never Trump” crowd. “I’ll be honest with you,[Boors]wasn’t exactly a well-known person before he became a target of these AI companies,” Smith said.

Josh Vlasto, a spokesman for Leadership the Future, said for comment: “From day one, we’ve said what’s happening right now in plain sight: Alex Bores is being bought and sold by Anthropic, its investors like Chris Larsen, the effective altruism community, and a network of fringe dark-money tech groups. He has three super PACs funded by Anthropic, its investors, its executives, and their allies who are trying to buy regulatory control of AI for themselves. Any group or supporter believes that by supporting Alex Burris They attack billionaires, and that’s either stupid or requires a quick Google search.

But rather than stifling Boris’s candidacy, AI companies have only boosted his visibility. A new poll released last week by Emerson College He shows him neck and neck with Lasher, two points behind him, and Boris has been doing it constantly He prevailed over his rivals in the last elections. In a strange way, Future Leadership ad buys became an in-kind donation to the Bored campaign, in the form of a multi-million dollar free ad campaign that did the hard work of raising voters’ awareness of the existence of the Bored.

Boris campaign spokeswoman Alyssa Cass said they initially thought it would be difficult to get voters to care about the safety of AI. “AI (regulation) is our strength, but it will take a lot of work from us to make this issue prominent in the region,” she said. Edge. “And starting in December, they started doing this work for us, which is making AI more important and regulating, and getting people thinking: Who are these people? What do they want to do to me and our society? “For people where it wasn’t their top priority, they made it their top priority.”

Suddenly, voters who were unaware of Boris’ existence were receiving mailers and ads describing him as anti-AI and pro-regulation, highlighting his authorship of the RAISE Act, a New York state law that restricted the launch of frontier AI models and was signed into law in December.

The ads became an unintended signal booster: The more Future Leadership attacked Bowers, the more media coverage it attracted, and voters became aware that a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley AI billionaires was trying to influence the Manhattan election, specifically targeting a candidate who wanted to regulate AI. It also inadvertently gave Boris the “it” factor that set him apart from seven other Democratic candidates running in Manhattan on a platform that held Donald Trump accountable: He was, quite literally, being targeted by tech billionaires who were donating to Trump Hall in exchange for AI deregulation. In fact, internal campaign polling shows that voters who received negative information about Boris were more likely to vote for him.

It also didn’t hurt for Boris to make fun of AI company ads. One of their first ads criticized Boris for his work at Palantir during the time the controversial tech company contracted with ICE, and suggested that Boris was a hypocrite for now saying he wanted to abolish ICE. Boris filed a cease and desist order against LTF for defamation, claiming he left Palantir because he opposed its relationship with ICE. He also noted on social media He said it was “ironic” that a Palantir billionaire would attack him because of it a job In Palantir.

This was even before Anthropic’s intervention raised national awareness of the race. In February, the Jobs and Democracy political action committee, affiliated with the pro-organisation First Public Labor Party, announced it would support Boris. Ports like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and POLITICO I began covering the fight over Boris as part of the long-running rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI ​​company that positions itself as the company most responsible for frontier labs — and which just donated $20 million to Public First Action, in direct opposition to Future Leadership and its ties to OpenAI.

This kind of media exposure is unheard of in House races. “You would kill for any earned media, you would kill for any paid media,” Smith said. “So the fact that he’s getting all this paid media, when he was virtually unknown outside politically informed circles before — it’s a gift.”