Meet the Congressional Candidate in the AI Industry's Crosshairs (original) (raw)

Alex Bores was phone banking for his upcoming primary the other day when he reached a particularly disgruntled voter. “Are you the Palantir guy? Absolutely not,” she snapped before hanging up.

Bores took a deep breath and then tried to appeal to her with a follow-up text. She’d seen the ads, of course, attacking him for his prior employment at the company that’s been dominating headlines for its involvement in ICE raids and bombing in the Middle East—ads that were partly funded, in a twist of truly breathtaking hypocrisy, by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. (Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, and SV Angel Founder Ron Conway have also given hefty sums to Leading the Future, the Super PAC seeding this narrative.) The part those ads left out? That Bores had resigned from the company in 2019 over his own concerns about its work enabling deportations. “I will do more homework,” the voter promised.

Bores, 35, is a New York assemblymember running in one of this election season’s most intriguing primaries, pitting him against John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, Kellyanne’s ex-husband George Conway, and former Jerry Nadler aide Micah Lasher. (Parkland shooting survivor Cam Casky was also in the running before he dropped out to dedicate himself to pro-Palestine activism full-time.) “Is New York’s 12th Congressional District about to experience the hottest primary ever?” reads one Reddit thread, alongside photos of the unusually youthful bunch.

While a lot can happen between now and June, early polls show Schlossberg and Bores pulling ahead of the pack. I asked if the young Kennedy scion’s history of shirtless selfies, Ripstik riding, and general “silly goose” antics has made him a less intimidating opponent. “I mean, look at some other people that have been elected recently,” Bores answered wryly.

Bores thinks he can offer some much-needed tech (policy) support amidst our aging gerontocracy. “I’ll be the second Democrat ever with a degree in computer science. I worked at start-ups. I understand how tech works.” Meanwhile, he’s had to devote no small part of his campaigning hours to playing defense against a multimillion-dollar ad spend from some of the most powerful people in tech. “They would like nothing more than for me to be spending all of my campaign money texting and emailing right now. So there’s some amount of just taking it on the chin,” he told me in an interview last week.

The AI industry has been running a playbook perfected by the crypto industry in 2024: Single-issue, pro-tech super PACs willing to spend staggering amounts to make an example out of a handful of candidates who dare to oppose them. With AI’s approval ratings sinking to all-time lows, these groups know they won’t get far on pro-AI messaging. So they play dirty.

“They don’t have to win forever. They have to win for one, maybe two more election cycles,” he told me. “That’s why they’re going so big right now.”

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Alex Bores speaks with a constituent in Manhattan in October 19, 2025.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times/Redux.

I met Bores on the steps of the New York Public Library, smack in the middle of the district he hopes to represent in Congress. The area encompasses most of midtown and the Upper East and West Sides. “It’s like, the most well-informed district,” Bores told me, beaming like an honor roll parent. “A third of the voters have master’s degrees or above.”

He told me he’s loved every minute of his job as an assemblyman on the Upper East Side, though he misses Tuesday night basketball games in Albany with now Mayor Zohran Mamdani (“No talk about work. We’re just here to ball.”)

When the long-tenured Jerry Nadler announced his retirement in September, Bores was at home with his two-week-old. “I had every reason in the world not to think about other big life changes aside from my son,” he told me. But at the end of the day, there were things other than his newborn keeping him up at night. Namely, Congress’s lack of meaningful action on AI regulation. “My motivation is, I want to pass these bills yesterday. I want to get these things done.”

Part of what makes the campaign against Bores so surprising is how relatively moderate he is. Far from the burn-down-the-data-centers rhetoric sweeping much of the left, Bores’s AI policy plan actually includes federal funding for AI research, upskilling workers to use AI, and support for data centers that use green energy and cover grid update costs. (The night before I met him, I spoke with an ACLU representative who told me she considered him too “pro-corporate” for her group’s liking.)

Bores believes there are two types of politicians: “people who move the Overton window” and “people putting points on the board.” While you need both, he argued, he believes himself to be the latter. Indeed, the Center for Effective Lawmaking ranked him the most effective new legislator in New York City after he passed 28 bills in just over three years in the Assembly.

That may be why tech players have got their sights trained on him. “If I lose, then they go to every other member of Congress and say, “Do you like your job?”

Bores would love the chance to step off defense to talk about the other policies that excite him—like pro-housing measures, affordability, and Medicare for all. Yet he also can’t help himself from bringing up AI, even when I don’t.

“I think we have very little time to get this right—not because we’re definitely not going to die in three years, but just because you’ll lock in certain power structures that will be much harder to change in the future,” he said.

Meanwhile, the attack PACs are already working their next angle, linking Bores to the disgraced effective altruism movement. Indeed, a sizable chunk of Bores’s campaign funding has poured in from figures like AI doomer in chief Eliezer Yudkowsky, former SBF roommate Adam Yedidia, and a range of AI-safety researchers from the frontier labs.

When I asked about his relationship to the effective altruism community, he answered tactfully. “If you’re talking about the philosophy of, ‘Hey, we should take seriously how we can do the most good in the world’…Yeah, no one disagrees with that.” But he clarifies, “That is not how I lead in describing my own identity.”

He said that yet again, parenting offered an important life lesson: “What you see is that the toddlers that resort to name-calling are the ones losing the argument.”