What Alex Bores’ defeat tells us about AI politics
The NY-12 House race drew over $27m from various AI PACs. But it’s hard to unpick their impact.
Alex Bores, the New York assemblyman who put AI safety at the heart of his campaign, lost to Micah Lasher in a race to represent New York’s 12th district in the House of Representatives on Tuesday. With most of the votes counted, Lasher had 39% of the votes, with Bores at 35%.
With pro-AI-industry super PAC Leading the Future having spent more than $8m to defeat Bores — and pro-safety super PACs pouring well over twice as much into supporting him — the race will be seen by many as a win for the AI industry and a loss for AI safety interests.
The reality, however, is more complicated. The odds were always in Lasher’s favor, and some have argued that Leading the Future’s opposition only served to raise Bores’ profile.
Lasher also indicated he may not be a compliant alternative to Bores, disavowing the AI PACs in his victory speech: “I have some news for the two big AI companies who’ve taken such an unusual interest in who won this congressional seat: I won’t be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs, our environment.”
Leading the Future’s public statement on the victory was subdued, too. Rather than taking a victory lap, PAC co-lead Josh Vlasto instead issued a generic statement outlining the PAC’s priorities. “Leading the Future is a cross-partisan, national organization dedicated to supporting a thoughtful and substantive dialogue and policy process around AI.”
“We are building a broad coalition at the federal and state levels, and will continue to support policymakers who will work together to pass a national regulatory framework with strong and smart guardrails that protect the safety of kids, users, and communities, ensures America wins the race against China, and creates good jobs for all Americans.”
Bores has long been an AI safety darling, and not just because he was the lead sponsor of New York’s RAISE Act, a relatively strong AI transparency bill signed into law last December. He also ran on an ambitious AI agenda, including policies such as mandatory reporting and independent safety testing for frontier models and well-resourced contingency plans for AI, including a possible kill switch should development turn catastrophic. In April, Bores went even further, proposing a direct payment program that would tax AI usage and equity in frontier AI firms to pay for a wealth distribution scheme to compensate for worker displacement.
From the start, Bores was an underdog. Lasher was a protégé of the ultra-wealthy, safely Democratic district’s representative Jerry Nadler, who held seats across New York for more than 30 years. Lasher also served as director of policy to New York Governor Kathy Hochul. Both Nadler and Hochul endorsed Lasher, and his campaign received at least $10m in backing from former New York Mayor and businessman Michael Bloomberg — more than Leading the Future spent opposing Bores.
Bores’ stance on AI nevertheless made him a high-profile target for Leading the Future, which ran ads attacking him for having worked at Palantir and receiving campaign donations from its employees, as well as support he garnered from rival PACs. Leading the Future’s funders include venture capital firm a16z, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna, and the AI company Perplexity.
Bores is the only candidate Leading the Future has opposed, and it has spent more in NY-12 than any race so far. It appears to have been attempting a similar strategy to the one Fairshake — the crypto super PAC that is largely credited for ushering in the most pro-crypto Congress ever after pouring money into the 2024 general election — used against former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who represented the deep-red state in the Senate for 18 years. It spent more than $40m opposing Brown, making an example of him and sending a message to politicians seeking office that they dare not cross the crypto lobby. Targeting Bores was similarly meant to demonstrate to other candidates they would be unwise to pick a fight with Silicon Valley.
Whether that actually worked is tough to call. When Leading the Future entered the race in November, prediction market Kalshi estimated Bores had a 10% chance of winning, and Lasher 61%. The day before the election, Kalshi put Bores at 31%, while Lasher was at 68%. Leading the Future’s opposition to Bores also helped turn the race into a national media story, with plenty of positive press coverage for Bores as a result.
It is also unclear, however, whether massive AI safety spending had much impact. Leading the Future’s opposition to Bores created a backlash which helped boost support from AI safety super PACs to more than $19m. More than $13m of that came from Jobs and Democracy PAC, part of the Public First network that is indirectly funded by Anthropic. Another $3.3m came from You Can Push Back, funded by crypto executive Chris Larsen, alongside $2.5m from DREAM NYC, backed by a group of AI workers and people with links to the effective altruism and AI safety movements. Employees of AI companies also donated more than $450,000 directly to his campaign in “hard money.”
Much of that spending came towards the end of the race, and it’s unclear how much it strengthened Bores.
Independent polling from April had Bores losing by nine points. The most recent set of polls conducted in May had the two closer, some putting Bores ahead and all estimating the gap at four points or less. As of the time of writing, with 87% of votes counted Lasher was ahead by four points.
Lasher did not make AI as central to his campaign as Bores, but still made commitments to support a national moratorium on data center construction, push back on government use of AI for things such as mass surveillance and civil rights abuses, and champion a national wage insurance program.
This race was an indicator for the rest of the Democratic party about how well an AI safety message would appeal to core Democratic voters. The lesson: AI is not currently a winning issue — but opposing the industry might not be catastrophic either. In his concession speech, Bores blasted Leading the Future, saying it was funded by “a handful of oligarchs hellbent on preventing any regulation of their industry whatsoever, any check on their power, the very people who are fueling Donald Trump.”
“Future victories will be built on the shoulders of the progress of this campaign. That’s how movements work.”
Correction, June 24: Corrected the details of polling, which had the gap between Lasher and Bores as four points or less, not three. Also corrected You Can Push Back’s spending on the race: it was $3.3m, not $3.8m.
Maybe he would have more credibility on these issues if he wasn’t taking millions from Anthropic. It’s hard to view him as anything but a subversive element given his ties to that company and his comments that open the door to a supposedly benign, well-regulated AI future.
to the folks who gave so much (in so many ways) for Bores’ campaign: feel so proud of yourselves 🫡 - don’t lose heart, there’ll be more battles to be won! 🪖
friendbanking volunteers, communicators, mobilizing organizers, donors 🫶 etc!