Tech Industry Pushes Back as AI Firms Spend Millions to Block Former Executive’s Congressional Run

Anyone who has seen the recent attack ads targeting New York Assembly member Alex Bores will know they focus heavily on his past at Palantir. This AI company powered the controversial raids and large-scale deportation efforts carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The ads go as far as accusing Bores of having earned hundreds of thousands of dollars helping build technology for ICE and “powering their deportations.”

But Bores says that framing leaves out a crucial part of the story. “I quit Palantir specifically over its work with ICE in 2019,” Bores said on last week’s episode of Equity.

He is now running for New York’s 12th congressional district, and in that race, outside groups backed by some of the biggest figures in tech are spending heavily to target his campaign.

The ads are being funded by a super PAC called Leading the Future, which, somewhat ironically, is backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI search startup Perplexity, and a range of other major names from Silicon Valley. The PAC has raised $125 million to oppose candidates in state races who are introducing AI legislation and to support candidates who favour a minimal or near-hands-off approach to regulating artificial intelligence.

“They have committed to spending at least $10 million against me…because they know I am the 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 the very reason Leading the Future chose him as its first target is his experience in the technology industry, including his time at Palantir and several startups.

“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 become only the second Democrat in Congress with a computer science degree.

Bores appears to have drawn Silicon Valley’s hostility after sponsoring the RAISE Act, an AI transparency bill that was signed into law in December. The law requires major AI labs, specifically those generating more than $500 million in revenue, to publicly maintain a safety plan, follow it, and report any catastrophic safety incident.

It is the relatively light-touch law that many industries might welcome, centred more on disclosure and planning than aggressive front-end oversight.

Bores says he does not believe Leading the Future wants any form of AI regulation at all, unless, as the PAC itself has suggested, it happens strictly at the federal level. Over the past year, states have increasingly battled with the industry over their ability to regulate AI in the absence of a national standard. In December, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to challenge state AI laws they considered “onerous,” including measures like Bores’ RAISE Act.

Bores pointed to his campaign’s proposed national AI governance blueprint, which spans eight issue areas and cincludes43 policy recommendations, arguing that anyone serious about meaningful federal AI regulation should support this candidacy. He has also introduced legislation requiring companies to disclose what goes into their training data and to embed metadata standards to make synthetic content easier to trace.

Leading the Future is not the only tech-backed super PAC shaping the midterms. Meta has invested $65 million in two separate super PACs, the American Technology Excellence Project and Mobilising Economic Transformation Across California, to elect state-level candidates seen as friendly to the tech and AI sectors. More broadly, AI companies, industry groups, and top executives donated at least $83 million in 2025 to federal campaigns and committees.

“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 $100,000 total, maybe less,” Bores continued. “For one company (Meta) to be spending $65 million on state races, let alone everything they’re doing in Congress — I think it’s tough for people to understand how much that is above the norm.”

At the same time, Bores has drawn support from a different PAC, Public First Action, backed by Anthropic, which is spending $450,000 on his behalf. Public First Action also describes itself as supportive of AI, but with an emphasis on transparency, safety, and public accountability.

In Bores’ view, Leading the Future represents “an extremely small minority of voices” who see any form of regulation as a danger to AI progress and who “want to let it rip.” Among his own supporters are tech workers employed at the same companies whose leaders are trying to undermine his campaign — a trend reflecting broader grassroots organising within tech firms over how AI is used and who ultimately benefits from it.

On the opposite end, Bores said, are the smaller group of people who “want to pretend AI never existed and put the genie back in the bottle and burn all the data centres.”

He believes most Americans are somewhere between those two extremes. They use AI, recognise its promise, but remain uneasy about the pace of its development.

“[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.