Silicon Valley billionaires just spent nearly $20 million on a local House primary in Manhattan, and it had almost nothing to do with traditional New York politics.
The June 2026 Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District transformed into an unprecedented proxy war. On one side stood a powerful coalition of tech donors backed by OpenAI investors. On the other, an opposing faction aligned with Anthropic and safety advocates. The target of this massive financial blitz was state Assemblyman Alex Bores, a former computer engineer whose legislative track record terrified the tech elite.
This isn't a simple story of corporate greed versus an underdog. It represents the first major electoral battleground over who gets to write the rules for artificial intelligence.
The Law That Triggered a Tech Frenzy
Alex Bores isn't your typical career politician. Before entering the New York Assembly, he worked at Palantir, a major data analytics firm, which he eventually left over internal ethical concerns. That background gave him the technical knowledge to author the RAISE Act, the second-most stringent state-level AI safety law in the United States.
The RAISE Act forced developers of major models to file public safety plans detailing how they would mitigate catastrophic risks. Specifically, the law targets scenarios where a system malfunction or misuse could cause severe harm or death to more than 50 people. Think weaponized biology or power grid meltdowns.
While a modified version of the bill eventually passed into law, tech giants never forgave Bores. They saw his legislation as a direct threat. If a single state assemblyman could implement a compliance minefield in New York, they feared what he might do if he won the congressional seat vacated by retiring Representative Jerry Nadler.
Two Factions and $18 Million in Ad Blitzes
The financial scale of this primary shocked veteran political analysts. Super PACs focused on tech policy raised over $100 million for the 2026 midterms, and roughly half of that money poured into this single Manhattan race.
A Super PAC called Leading the Future, operating through its subsidiary Think Big, directed $8.2 million toward attack ads designed to defeat Bores. The group is heavily funded by tech figures who favor a hands-off approach, including OpenAI President Greg Brockman, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
These donors argue that a patchwork of state-level regulations will cripple American tech companies, effectively handing the global race to competitors in China. They contend that any oversight should come strictly from a federal framework.
The massive ad offensive triggered an equally fierce counter-mobilization. An opposing wing of the industry rushed to Bores’ defense. A PAC named Public First, led by former Democratic Congressman Brad Carson, poured over $6 million into boosting Bores. Public First received a massive $20 million influx from Anthropic, the creators of the Claude chatbot. Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who split from the company specifically over disagreements regarding safety protocols.
Cryptocurrency billionaire Chris Larsen also chipped in $3.5 million to protect Bores, stating that his involvement was a direct response to OpenAI’s attempts to make an example out of a candidate pushing for common-sense oversight.
Ideology Over Candidates
The strangest part of this multi-million-dollar feud is that it barely focused on Bores' actual platform or his primary opponent, Assemblyman Micah Lasher. In fact, Lasher had actually supported Bores' RAISE Act in the state legislature.
The tech donors funding the anti-Bores ads weren't necessarily trying to elect Lasher because they thought he would be a libertarian tech ally. They spent millions simply to send a clear message to every local and national politician in America: if you sponsor aggressive regulations against our software, we will fund a primary challenger to end your career.
Josh Vlasto, a leader at Leading the Future, accused Bores of being bought by Anthropic’s dark money. Meanwhile, Bores framed the race as a battle of core philosophies, stating it was about choosing whether to regulate the powerful to protect ordinary citizens or to give massive corporations a free pass.
The Playbook for Future Elections
This Manhattan primary provides a blueprint for how tech interest groups will operate in future election cycles. You can expect these groups to deploy specific strategies moving forward.
- Targeting early-stage lawmakers: Tech PACs will intervene heavily at the state and primary levels to stop regulatory momentum before it reaches Washington.
- Framing regulation as a national security failure: Expect future corporate campaigns to argue that domestic safeguards undermine the American tech sector against foreign adversaries.
- Deepening industry rifts: The divide between safety-first developers and speed-to-market investors will continue to spill into campaign finance.
Politicians across the country are watching the fallout from this race. The massive influx of capital proves that tech oversight is no longer a niche policy issue discussed only in congressional committees. It is now a high-stakes political battlefield capable of reshaping campaigns overnight.
