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And now for the main event…

As the last trickle of primary voters hit the polls on Tuesday night, a handful of very interested outside parties will be closely observing the results in central Manhattan, where congressional hopeful Alex Bores has faced down a veritable flood of Silicon Valley spending. Bores, of course, is the New York assemblyman responsible for the Raise Act, the state’s landmark A.I. safety bill, which has subsequently made him public enemy number one for Leading the Future—the pro-A.I. super PAC fueled by some $25 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna; as well as $100 million from a16z and its co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. As of March 31, the group had around $51 million in cash on hand—at least $8 million of which had gone toward taking out Bores.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the polls. While the a16z guys were buying advertising that painted Bores as an enemy of U.S. innovation and a China crony, a number of pro-safety A.I. researchers and tech investors rose up to support him. The first of these opposition PACs to emerge was Dream NYC, a group dedicated to both combating Leading the Future and getting Bores elected. The super PAC, established in November, has been primarily funded by individual contributions from Daniel Ziegler, a researcher at Anthropic, who has donated nearly $800,000—more than half of which arrived in May. It has also received a few hundred thousand in funding from an OpenAI researcher and a Jane Street trader.

Public First Action, helmed by former U.S. Reps. Brad Carson and Chris Stewart, followed a few weeks later. “We exist because L.T.F. announced their intention to destroy people who supported A.I. sanity,” Carson said in a May X post. “Our job is to keep the debate free from intimidation.” The group, a 501(c)(4) “dark money” organization that does not reveal its donors, received $20 million from Anthropic in February. Other than that, the only donation listed in its regulatory filings is a $500,000 contribution from Michael Cohen, an A.I. safety researcher from U.C. Berkeley. Anthropic declined a request for comment, but a source familiar with its political strategy clarified that its donation was restricted so that the money could not be used for election activity.

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Then, in April, tech billionaire Chris Larsen self-funded the You Can Push Back PAC, which is focused on commonsense A.I. guardrails specifically to protect kids, to the tune of $3.5 million. And last week, yet another new PAC threw its hat in the ring: the Guardrails Alliance. Shaunna Thomas, one of the co-founders, described Guardrails as “the people’s response to [Leading the Future’s] checkbook.” They’ve raised $5 million so far from individuals and labor unions.

According to data analyzed by Transformer, those four PACs have collectively spent $18 million in the Bores primary, compared to the $8 million from Think Big, an arm of Leading the Future. Some $12.2 million, in particular, came from an arm of Public First. (“Any claim that we oppose regulation is flat wrong. The public record clearly shows that support for Alex Bores from Anthropic and its allies began well before Leading the Future entered the race,” Leading the Future announced in a statement late last week. Alyssa Cass, a spokesperson for Bores, told me: “The tactics and the messaging that Leading the Future has used has served to unite everyone else.”)

Manhattan is currently ground zero for this fight, but You Can Push Back, Public First, and Leading the Future are all active elsewhere, and Guardrails plans to get involved “in any competitive Democratic primary where Leading the Future or its allies are spending.” Interestingly, there is occasional alignment between Public First and L.T.F.—both have supported Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern in his race for Senate, for instance. Meanwhile, You Can Push Back is already pouring money into Colorado in anticipation of future investment from L.T.F., which has spent millions supporting candidates in Illinois, Georgia, and Utah. As we’ve already seen countless times before, everything that touches A.I. is expensive.

In many ways, this is a familiar playbook, emulating tactics pioneered by Fairshake, the pro-crypto super PAC, in previous election cycles. The pro-A.I. effort features some familiar faces, too. Former Schumer aide Josh Vlasto, a longtime advisor and spokesperson for Fairshake, now co-leads Leading the Future. Longtime Democratic operative Chris Lehane, who used to work with Coinbase and helped get Fairshake off the ground, is now OpenAI’s head policy honcho. Fairshake, like L.T.F., was also heavily funded by Andreessen Horowitz. Molly White, the independent A.I. researcher behind the Tech Influence Watch site, told me that L.T.F.’s goal with Bores is to identify races where “they can essentially make an example of a candidate who either genuinely is opposed to their goals and agenda, or can be presented as opposed to their goals and agenda.”

But even though the playbook is familiar, the context isn’t. The same opposition PACs that turned the Bores race into a flashpoint for A.I. spending, tech influence, and regulation never really formed up against the crypto industry, White said. She added that “A.I. is a more galvanizing issue for voters.”

One Democratic strategist I spoke with confirmed that a lot of campaigns are watching closely to see where Bores lands, something that will surely impact how candidates discuss A.I. moving forward. Tyler Johnston, the founder of A.I. safety advocacy nonprofit The Midas Project, said that if Bores wins, “strategists will start to be more willing to endorse regulation, and if Bores loses, they’ll probably see the industry PAC as scarier.” White agreed, adding that the presence of the opposition PACs, combined with the sheer fiscal might of L.T.F., makes this one an “unusual race” and is likely inspiring a fair amount of caution among candidates.

But Sacha Haworth, the executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, thinks it doesn’t matter whether Bores wins or loses his primary. “The end result has been that nobody wants to publicly associate themselves with Big Tech A.I. super PACs, with Leading the Future,” she told me, pointing to OpenAI’s own recent efforts to publicly distance itself from the organization. She argued that this race was much bigger than Bores and New York; given the launch of the Guardrails Alliance, which is funded by both tech workers and labor unions, “the pushback is a manifestation of what Americans are asking their leaders to do across the country.”

As we move toward midterms in November, Haworth expects more and more politicians and candidates alike to distance themselves from Big Tech A.I. dollars—publicly, at least—“because their money is actually toxic.” And if the House turns blue in November, she expects we’ll see a widespread “demand for accountability,” something that might manifest itself in oversight hearings “to uncover what sort of influence they may have had without our knowledge in governance over their own products and their own industry.” For now, though, we wait.

That’s all for today. I’ll see you on Thursday.

Ian

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