A super PAC funded by some of the biggest names in AI spent millions trying to end one politician’s career. It did the opposite. According to The Verge AI, Leading the Future, a group backed by OpenAI, Palantir, and a16z executives, has spent an estimated $2.4 million attacking New York state assemblyman Alex Bores since December 2025. The goal was to sink his run for the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Jerry Nadler. Instead, Bores is now a frontrunner in an eight-person Democratic primary, and the AI industry handed him the spotlight.
What stands out here is the math. Bores didn’t fight back with money. The Verge AI reports his campaign placed its first New York ad buy on May 11th, nearly seven months after he entered the race and just weeks before the June 23rd primary. His opponents, meanwhile, had real advantages going in. So this isn’t a story of a candidate outspending his rivals. It’s a story of opponents spending millions to make a little-known assemblyman famous.
What happened
- Who: Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee and New York state assemblyman, author of the RAISE Act, a state law restricting the release of frontier AI models that was signed in December.
- Who’s against him: Leading the Future, a super PAC whose backers include Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman.
- The spend: Roughly $2.4 million in attack ads since December 2025, in what’s described as the most expensive media market in the country.
- The result: A recent Emerson College poll shows Bores within two points of frontrunner Micah Lasher, and he’s led in other recent surveys.
The Streisand effect, in politics
The attack ads described Bores as anti-AI and pro-regulation. They highlighted his authorship of the RAISE Act. For a voter who had never heard of him, that’s not a smear. It’s an introduction. As his campaign spokeswoman Alyssa Cass told The Verge AI, the team had assumed AI safety would be a hard issue to make voters care about. The PAC did that work for them, starting in December.
“For people for whom it wasn’t top of mind, they made it top of mind,” Cass said.
The coverage compounded the effect. Every wave of ads drew more press attention, and more attention meant more voters learned that a super PAC backed by Silicon Valley AI billionaires was trying to swing a Manhattan election against the one candidate who wanted to regulate AI. In a field of eight Democrats running on holding Donald Trump accountable, that gave Bores a clear identity none of the others had.
Why the playbook failed this time
This is significant because the same network has a track record of winning. The Verge AI notes the group behind Leading the Future already ousted Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Katie Porter in 2024 through Fairshake, a crypto industry super PAC. Unlimited outside spending usually buries a target. New York political operative Lis Smith, who ran Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign, put the cost in perspective: “The New York media market is the most expensive media market in the country. You’d kill for any bit of air time.”
The PAC isn’t backing down. Spokesperson Josh Vlasto told The Verge AI that Bores is “bought and sold by Anthropic, its investors,” and tied him to Effective Altruist groups and Anthropic-aligned super PACs. The fight, in other words, is a proxy war between AI factions over who gets to write the rules.
Why it matters for the AI industry
The lesson cuts deeper than one primary. AI regulation has spent years as a wonky, abstract topic that most voters tuned out. This race turned it into a concrete question: who are these people, and what do they want to do to society? When the industry’s deregulation push becomes the story, the regulator becomes the hero.
Expect AI super PACs to keep spending heavily into 2026, but expect them to study this race closely first. The primary closes June 23rd. You can read the full reporting at the original source.