Artificial intelligence oligarchs want to make an example out of Assemblymember Alex Bores, a former Palantir employee who quit the industry for public service and wrote the strongest AI safety regulation in the nation. They’re spending millions to thwart his campaign to replace longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District.
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But a host of progressive groups have started pouring money into a new super PAC to counterbalance the AI industry’s attempt to discipline one of its own. The Guardrails Alliance PAC yesterday launched its first ad buy of the cycle, spending $250,000 on a pair of videos that highlight how much AI billionaires want to stop Bores from winning.
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“AI oligarchs and one of Trump’s biggest donors are spending millions to buy this congressional seat,” one of the ads says. “Let’s send them a message.”
The PAC registered last month and is funded by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Movement Voter Project, UltraViolet Action, and the powerful Working Families Party (WFP), along with “a wide range of individual donors including former and current tech workers.”
Just as the pro-Palestine super PAC American Priorities launched to fight the spending power of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Guardrails Alliance is likewise planning a targeted attack. It cannot outspend the AI industry or meet it one-to-one. But it can educate people who already hate artificial intelligence about where the industry is spending its money, and how they can counteract it.
“I think about this as the torpedo blowing up the Death Star,” said Adam Green, a founding board member of Guardrails Action, a 501(c)(4) that launched alongside the new super PAC to lobby against the AI industry. He’s also a board member and co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
According to a new poll by Pew Research, most people have neutral to negative views about the technology. Just 16 percent believe AI’s impact on society will be positive over the next 20 years. Forty percent say it will be negative. The vast majority of people, 67 percent, believe the U.S. government will do nothing to meaningfully regulate the technology, and nearly 60 percent distrust that companies will develop AI safely.
Yet artificial intelligence executives continue to expand, thanks to backing from the Trump administration. They want to keep it that way, so they are spending millions to take down Bores. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and other major Trump donors fund Leading the Future, which has so far spent $7.6 million against Bores through a subsidiary.
Certain wealthy AI figures are backing Bores, in what some news outlets have characterized as a tech industry civil war over whether and how it should be regulated. Anthropic has donated to political groups that have spent over $10 million in favor of Bores; Anthropic investor Chris Larsen has spent $3.5 million alone. Anthropic is reputedly more concerned about safety than other AI companies and is quarreling with the Trump administration over the government’s use of its technology for war machines.
But Green argued that Anthropic is an imperfect messenger in this case. “Anthropic has more money but doesn’t have clean hands to say, ‘See these guys running ads about your health care? They don’t care about your health care. They are Big AI and want to do this to your job, this to your kids,’” Green said.
With that in mind, the goal is “less to compete on volume and more to turn their volume from an asset to a liability,” Green said. “Like when Elon Musk’s $30 million in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race motivated people to march to the polls and vote against him.”
Early voting in the NY-12 primary is already under way and Election Day is June 23. The race is just the beginning. The PAC will announce additional candidates it’s backing in the upcoming days, a spokesperson said, and plans to shadow Leading the Future “to expose their money and agenda.”
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BORES QUIT HIS JOB AT PALANTIR during the first Trump administration because of the company’s work helping President Trump terrorize immigrants. He was there for five years, between 2014 and 2019, first as a data scientist and in the end leading the company’s work with the federal government. He reportedly worked on contracts with the Departments of Justice and Veterans Affairs, and never on the contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But he couldn’t stomach sticking around to watch Palantir help Trump deport people.
The reason tech oligarchs view him as a threat is the state legislation he wrote and passed, and which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed into law late last year after originally attempting to gut it.
The Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act is the first law of its kind. It requires large artificial intelligence developers to create and publish information about their safety protocols and report incidents to the state within 72 hours of learning of them. It also created an oversight office within the state’s Department of Financial Services that will issue reports to “assess large frontier developers and enable greater transparency.” The law expanded on the requirements in California’s Senate Bill 53, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law three months earlier.
Under the RAISE Act, New York’s attorney general can bring civil actions against developers if they fail to submit required reports or make false statements and fine them penalties of up to $1 million for the first violation and up to $3 million for subsequent ones. State-imposed consequences are necessary, Hochul said in a statement last year, because “the federal government lags behind, failing to implement common-sense regulations that protect the public.”
The bill also makes it possible for additional disclosure and legislation to follow, Bores said at the time.
“In New York, we defeated last-ditch attempts from AI oligarchs to wipe out this bill and, by doing so, raised the floor for what AI safety legislation can look like,” he said. The law remains in place even as Trump has issued an executive order aimed at blocking state regulation of AI.
After their loss against the law, AI executives are now trying to defeat Bores himself, as well as any other candidate they see as a threat. Leading the Future is spending $140 million to stop candidates who would regulate them. Some are also adding warnings about Bores’s RAISE Act into their financial disclosures, and referring to it as a business risk factor, as Elon Musk does in corporate filings for his Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
It’s noteworthy that Bores is a former Palantir employee because he understands the technology behind AI and can write regulations based on that knowledge, said Shaunna Thomas, co-founder of Guardrails Alliance and co-founder and former executive director of gender justice organization UltraViolet. She also noted that Bores is not the only person from the tech industry with concerns about artificial intelligence.
“The fact that he left Palantir and his next move was to go into civil service, to run for office and put regulation in place, tells you a lot about how concerned people are with very deep knowledge of AI and the need for putting regulation in place,” Thomas told the Prospect.
“He doesn’t call himself this but the fact that they’re coming at him so hard [shows that] they’re treating him as a defector,” she added. “They’re trying to teach someone in a similar position not to do it.”
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