Voters in New York's 12th Congressional District go to the polls today in a Democratic primary that, on paper, is a local contest to replace the retiring Jerry Nadler. In practice it has become the most expensive intramural fight the AI industry has yet staged. More than 15 million dollars in AI-backed money has flooded the race, much of it aimed at one candidate: Alex Bores, a state assemblyman and former Palantir engineer who co-sponsored New York's law requiring AI companies to report safety incidents.
The lines of the fight map almost exactly onto the rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic. On one side is Leading the Future, a super PAC funded largely by the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, an OpenAI investor, and by OpenAI's president Greg Brockman. It has raised more than 75 million dollars and spent 23.5 million across races from Texas to Montana, with a mission to oppose policies it says stifle innovation or hand AI leadership to China. After Bores entered, OpenAI-aligned PACs unleashed ads warning that laws like his would create a "chaotic patchwork of state rules."
On the other side stands Public First, set up in direct opposition. Anthropic, which has publicly called for more regulation, contributed 20 million dollars to an affiliated nonprofit that opposes federal efforts to freeze state-level rules without adequate safeguards. Its PACs have spent 16.6 million on congressional races, and the crypto investor Chris Larsen added nearly 2 million backing Bores. As the independent researcher Molly White put it, the political antagonism "really mirrors the corporate competition" between two companies that are racing each other to public markets and feuding over how AI should be governed.
What is striking is how little the actual candidate seems to matter to the spenders. White's assessment is blunt: a single junior congressperson is unlikely to swing national AI policy either way. The torrent of ads, she argues, is really a signal aimed at every other politician watching, a demonstration of what happens to those who line up for or against tighter rules. Whichever side wins will hold the result up as a warning. The mailers that buried Bores' district may have mostly succeeded in raising his profile, but the deterrent message lands regardless of who takes the seat.
Behind the spectacle sits an uncomfortable fact: Congress has done almost nothing. AI-focused super PACs have already poured 43.3 million dollars into this cycle's congressional races, and in 2025 OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet and Nvidia spent a combined 50.9 million on lobbying, with Anthropic and OpenAI sharply increasing their outlays this year. Yet federal AI legislation remains stalled, with lawmakers still arguing over whether to take up the issue at all. The industry is spending lavishly to shape rules that do not yet exist, which is its own kind of answer. As one analyst warned, a public growing queasy about AI cannot be left out of the conversation, or it will simply refuse to trust the technology being sold to it. Today's result in Manhattan will be read, by everyone who paid for it, as a forecast.