Two of the biggest names in AI just spent $27 million trying to swing a single local primary, and neither side got what it wanted. According to The Verge AI, Anthropic and OpenAI backed opposing super PACs in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional district, turning an obscure Manhattan race into a national test case for AI regulation. The outcome: New York Assemblyman Alex Bores, the candidate at the center of it all, narrowly lost to Assemblyman Micah Lasher, 35 percent to 39.1 percent.
What actually happened
Bores wasn’t a household name before this race. He became one after coauthoring the RAISE Act, a bill that put safety requirements and guardrails on frontier AI companies. A version of it was signed into New York state law last year. That made him a target.
The Verge AI reports that the spending broke down like this:
- Leading the Future, a $100 million deregulatory super PAC funded in part by executives from OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz, spent $8.15 million against Bores.
- Four pro-Bores PACs (Jobs and Democracy, Dream NYC, You Can Push Back, and the Guardrails Alliance) spent a combined $19.26 million to defend him.
Several of those pro-Bores groups trace back to Anthropic. Jobs and Democracy was funded by Public First, which received a $20 million donation from Anthropic. Dream NYC was backed by an early Anthropic employee, and another group got $3.5 million from Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen, who told The New York Times he wanted to push back on OpenAI’s influence.
By law, Bores couldn’t coordinate with any of them. He was a candidate caught between two warring corporate agendas.
Why this matters
This is the first time we’ve seen AI companies treat a local primary like a proxy battlefield for federal policy. The money wasn’t really about NY-12. It was about sending a signal ahead of the 2026 midterms, where AI regulation is shaping up to be a live wire.
What stands out here is the split inside the industry itself. This wasn’t AI versus its critics. It was OpenAI’s deregulatory camp against Anthropic’s safety-focused camp, fighting through political money. That tells you the fault line in AI policy now runs straight through the companies building the technology.
The context the headlines miss
Bores lost, but the AI fight probably wasn’t the deciding factor. Local Manhattan politics carried more weight. Lasher was long seen as the protégé of retiring Congressman Jerry Nadler, and he had backing from a super PAC run by billionaire former mayor Michael Bloomberg. That establishment support is what pushed him over the line. Worth noting: Lasher had also cosponsored the RAISE Act, so this was never a clean pro-AI versus anti-AI matchup.
Bores still outperformed expectations. He beat JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg and former Republican lawyer George Conway, who finished a distant fifth. In his concession, Bores framed the close result as a warning to the industry: “They set out to make people afraid to stand up to them. Instead, they learned just how ready people are to push back.”
What comes next
The spending didn’t stop with this race. Per The Verge AI, citing Transformer’s campaign finance tracker, both sides have now dropped a combined $50.1 million across 19 states. NY-12 was the most expensive, followed by recent Texas primaries at $4.6 million across seven races.
A few things to watch:
- The general election in NY-12 is locked for a Democrat, so the real AI fights move elsewhere.
- Trump’s shifting position on AI regulation will increasingly define GOP races, and his views have been hard to pin down.
- Data centers are becoming a nationwide flashpoint, even though they didn’t register in Manhattan.
The takeaway for anyone working in AI: regulation is no longer a quiet policy debate happening in committee rooms. It’s a funded, public, company-versus-company political war, and we’re only at the opening round. Expect a lot more of this money to show up as the midterms approach. Full details are available at the original report from The Verge AI.