How an AI attack made this politician famous

By the time the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th congressional district concludes in June, two of the biggest names in artificial intelligence will have poured millions into a high-stakes clash over who controls the future of AI regulation. But the unexpected victor in this battle between Anthropic and OpenAI may be the very person they’re targeting: a previously little-known New York state assemblyman whose profile has been dramatically elevated by what can only be described as a Streisand effect on steroids.

Since late 2025, Leading the Future, a super PAC bankrolled by OpenAI, Palantir, and a16z executives, has spent millions attacking Alex Bores, the architect of one of the nation’s first AI regulatory laws. The PAC’s goal was to derail his campaign for the seat being vacated by longtime Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. Instead, Bores has emerged as a front-runner in the crowded eight-person race to become what New York Magazine recently called the “face of Manhattan.”

What makes this turnaround remarkable is that Bores hasn’t relied on a massive advertising blitz. His campaign placed its first paid ad in New York on May 11, nearly seven months after he entered the race and just weeks before the June 23rd primary. Meanwhile, Leading the Future, backed by figures like Joe Lonsdale, Marc Andreessen, and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, has been running attack ads against Bores since December 2025, spending an estimated $2.4 million.

In most political contests, a corporate-backed super PAC with unlimited spending power could crush a lesser-funded opponent. Leading the Future’s affiliated groups already succeeded in unseating Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Katie Porter in 2024. And in Manhattan, where advertising costs are astronomical, the advantage seemed insurmountable. “It is so expensive to advertise in a New York primary,” noted Lis Smith, a veteran political operative who managed Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign. “The New York media market is the most expensive in the country. You’d kill for any bit of air time.”

When Bores entered the race last October, the former Palantir employee faced stiff competition from candidates with deeper pockets and stronger name recognition. Micah Lasher had the backing of Nadler’s political machine and Mike Bloomberg’s super PAC. Jack Schlossberg, JFK’s grandson, enjoyed support from national Democrats nostalgic for Camelot. George Conway had the Never Trump crowd in his corner. “I’m gonna be honest with you, [Bores] wasn’t exactly a well-known quantity prior to becoming a target of these AI companies,” Smith said.

Josh Vlasto, a spokesperson for Leading the Future, defended the PAC’s strategy, stating, “From day one, we have said what is now playing out in plain sight: Alex Bores is bought and sold by Anthropic, its investors like Chris Larsen, the Effective Altruist community, and a network of dark money fringe tech groups.” He added that Bores has three super PACs funded by Anthropic and its allies, accusing them of trying to “buy regulatory control of AI for themselves.”

But rather than crushing Bores’ candidacy, the attacks backfired spectacularly. A recent Emerson College poll shows Bores neck-and-neck with Lasher, trailing by just two points, and he has consistently led in other surveys. In an ironic twist, Leading the Future’s ad buys functioned as a multimillion-dollar in-kind donation to the Bores campaign, raising voter awareness about a candidate who might otherwise have remained obscure.

“For people for whom it wasn’t top of mind, they made it top of mind,” said Alyssa Cass, a spokeswoman for the Bores campaign. She explained that the campaign initially worried about making voters care about AI safety. “And they, starting in December, started doing that work for us, of raising the saliency of AI and AI regulation, and making people think: Who are these people? What do they want to do to me, and to our society?”

Voters who had never heard of Bores suddenly received mailers and ads portraying him as anti-AI and pro-regulation, highlighting his authorship of the RAISE Act, a New York law signed in December that restricts the release of frontier AI models. The more Leading the Future attacked, the more media coverage Bores received, and the more voters learned that Silicon Valley billionaires were trying to influence a Manhattan election by targeting a candidate who wanted to regulate AI. Internal campaign polling shows that voters who received negative information about Bores were actually more likely to support him.

The AI companies’ ads also proved easy for Bores to ridicule. One ad criticized him for working at Palantir during a period when the company contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, accusing him of hypocrisy for now opposing ICE. Bores responded with a cease-and-desist letter for defamation, noting he left Palantir precisely because he opposed its ICE relationship. He also pointed out the “irony” of a Palantir billionaire attacking him for working there.

The race reached national prominence in February when the Jobs and Democracy PAC, affiliated with the pro-regulation super PAC Public First Action, announced its support for Bores. Outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Politico began covering the contest as a proxy war between OpenAI and Anthropic, the latter having donated $20 million to Public First Action. This level of media exposure is virtually unheard of in House races. “You’d kill for any earned media, you’d kill for any paid media,” said Smith. “So the fact that he’s getting all this paid media, when he was a virtual unknown outside of extremely political insider circles before , it’s a gift.”