Big Tech's Big Spend: Why Silicon Valley Is Fighting a Manhattan State Legislator

A political group backed by major AI executives and venture capitalists has spent roughly $2.4 million on negative ads targeting Alex Bores, a New York state assemblyman running for Congress in Manhattan's 12th District. Bores, who wrote some of the first AI regulations passed by any state, has become the unusual focus of a sustained campaign by the technology industry to stop his campaign before it gains momentum.

The super PAC behind the effort, called Leading the Future, draws money from prominent Silicon Valley figures including Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, and Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI. The group began running attack ads against Bores in December 2025, months before he spent money on his own campaign advertising.

The Candidate at the Center

Bores comes to this race with a mix of technical background and regulatory credentials that is rare in politics. A former employee of Palantir, a big-data company, he studied computer science at Cornell University and Georgia Tech, then worked in data analysis before running for the New York State Assembly in 2022. His work experience includes helping law enforcement with violent crime investigations and building software tools that helped roughly 50,000 families access COVID relief programs.

Since winning his assembly seat, Bores passed state-level regulations on large AI models—a significant achievement for someone with both real technical knowledge and hands-on experience with regulation. This combination has made him a target for groups trying to shape a congressional race that will fill the seat of longtime Representative Jerry Nadler.

Much of the attack advertising has zeroed in on Bores' time at Palantir. In December, a related PAC spent $120,000 on an ad claiming Bores earned hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling technology for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Bores rejected the claim in a cease-and-desist letter, saying he never worked on the ICE contract and had explicitly avoided immigration-related work on other projects.

Money and Industry Politics

This race has become a test case for how much political muscle the tech industry is willing to flex. While Leading the Future attacks Bores with negative ads, tech figures including billionaire Chris Larsen and employees of Anthropic (an AI safety company) have contributed a combined $4.59 million in support of his campaign. This mirrors a pattern we saw in 2024, when the crypto industry's super PAC successfully targeted sitting members of Congress.

Leading the Future has committed to spending up to $100 million across the upcoming election cycle, meaning the NY-12 race is essentially a pilot project for how the group plans to operate. The focused attention on one state assemblyman signals how seriously the tech industry is taking the prospect of federal AI regulation.

Bores has raised roughly $2.86 million from individual donors while refusing money from corporate political action committees. But his funding map raises an eyebrow: only 12 percent of his donations come from his own district. He has actually raised more money from Berkeley, California than from Manhattan. About 75 percent of his donors live outside New York state entirely.

The Broader Race

The Democratic primary on June 23rd includes eight candidates competing for the seat. State Assemblyman Micah Lasher, backed by Nadler's political organization and Mike Bloomberg's super PAC, is Bores' main rival. An Emerson College poll shows them running nearly even for the lead.

The field also includes Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President John F. Kennedy, and George Conway, a lawyer and ex-husband of former Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway. The variety of candidates reflects the prominence of a Manhattan congressional seat, though the tech industry's focused campaign against Bores suggests his regulatory background has singled him out in Silicon Valley's political calculations.

We have seen this pattern play out before. The pharmaceutical industry mobilized against healthcare reformers; the financial sector opposed banking regulation advocates. When an industry with large stakes in federal policy sees a candidate with relevant expertise and skepticism toward their interests, they tend to spend money to stop that candidate. What is striking here is how quickly and heavily the AI industry has moved against relatively modest state-level regulatory work.

The timing also matters. Leading the Future began its attack campaign months before Bores spent serious money on his own advertising—a deliberate strategy to damage a candidate's image before he has a chance to introduce himself to voters on his own terms. This is a well-established political tactic: define the opponent early, when his narrative is still unformed.

The June 23rd primary will tell us something important about whether sustained, well-funded negative advertising can overcome a candidate's technical credentials and real regulatory experience in a district where voters may care about both business expertise and the need for oversight. How this race unfolds will likely shape how the tech industry approaches elections in the years ahead, especially as artificial intelligence regulation moves from the state level to Congress, where the stakes will be considerably higher.