Why corporate AI super PACs spent $27 million on a local election

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We’re coming to you one day early to give you a bird’s-eye view of the New York 12th Congressional District primary before polls close tonight. If you care about artificial intelligence, you’re going to want to watch this race because the tech industry has spent an astounding $27.83 million to influence the results.

A few weeks ago, Jack Schlossberg, the Kennedy family’s zillennial scion running for the open NY-12 House seat in Manhattan, posted a wild insinuation on X: that he was being astroturfed by bots and fake accounts working on behalf of his rival, the progressive New York state assemblyman Alex Bores. A Politico New York article followed up on the claims and uncovered a deeper network of coordinated digital messaging, verifying at least eight new accounts on TikTok and Instagram posting pro-Bores content. Politico pulled enough evidence to suggest that they were connected to You Can Push Back, a super PAC created by Ripple cofounder crypto billionaire Chris Larsen to back Bores and neuter OpenAI’s potential political influence in Congress. (You Can Push Back declined to comment to Politico.)

The wild thing, however, is that in the course of reporting this story, Politico also had to ask two other pro-Bores PACs whether they were behind the campaign. Both of them, incidentally, are connected to Anthropic: Dream NYC, which had an initial massive donation from a single Anthropic employee, and the Jobs and Democracy super PAC is directly funded by Public First Action, a nonprofit advocacy group that received a $20 million donation from Anthropic itself. The ironic thing is, as Bores and his campaign have repeatedly emphasized, they never planned for AI safety to be the center of his campaign. Instead, the feuding super PACs have pushed that label onto him. And considering this race is set in the land of Sex and the City, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is any corporate influence in an election, even if it’s connected to the “good guys” of AI, a political liability?

As I’ve written previously, Bores, who co-sponsored the first AI safety law in the country which was successfully passed, has become the inadvertent center of the feud between the safety-minded Anthropic and seemingly every other AI company. To briefly summarize: Leading the Future, a $100 million super PAC focused on supporting AI-boosting candidates in the congressional midterms, began airing anti-Bores ads last year. In response, two safety-minded AI super PACs connected to Anthropic, as well as the super PAC connected to Larsen, began running ads promoting Bores. All in, the pro-Bores PACs with tech oligarch funding have spent a combined $19.4 million, according to Transformer — more than what the Bores campaign has spent during the entire campaign, and also more than what Leading the Future spent specifically to defeat him. (Its PAC, Think Big, has spent $8.15 million against Bores.)

Legally, the Bores campaign is not allowed to coordinate messaging with any of the super PACs supporting him, and the campaign has assiduously avoided talking about the Anthropic-aligned super PACs fighting over him. But now a fourth super PAC has entered the game, specifically to call out the presence of the corporate wars: the Guardrails Alliance, a newly launched grassroots vehicle made up primarily of unions and non-gajillionaire tech workers. Last week, that group pledged to spend $250,000 on pro-Bores advertising before the election. In an interview with The New York Times, cofounder Shaunna Thomas said that the Guardrails Alliance was specifically built as a counterweight to the feuding billionaires. “This is not about matching [Leading the Future] dollar for dollar, fighting them with money or another set of billionaires,” she told the Times. “What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about the way the anti-regulation A.I. tech sector is trying to manipulate elections.”

It’s not clear yet how much tech sector manipulation will shape the race, as there’s been no new public polling on the race — at least, no new polls made without prediction market data — since May 21st, when Emerson College found that Bores was neck-and-neck with his top competitor, fellow state Assemblyman Micah Lasher. And there are plenty of other factors at play: Lasher’s connections to the New York City political establishment, Lasher’s backing by Michael Bloomberg’s super PAC, Schlossberg’s connections to the Kennedy network, and a very, very long list of other outside PACs spending in New York. (One meta-narrative that isn’t bedeviling this race: Mayor Zohran Mamdani has declined to endorse anyone in NY-12, so unlike a lot of other New York races, this primary is less about Mamdani securing a progressive mandate and more about the candidates themselves.)

But while the tech billionaires are looking at this race as a referendum on whose super PAC can beat the others — why else would one need a fourth super PAC designed to specifically call them out? — the residents of NY-12 may have other issues on their minds. Last week, The New Yorker informally canvassed the district and found that the Manhattanites were just as concerned with affordability, Israel, pushing back against Donald Trump, and changing the direction of the Democratic Party. (Whoever wins this race is the de facto winner in November, given Manhattan skews predominantly blue in general elections.) And right now, they have not three, but four candidates to choose from: George Conway, a former Republican-turned-Never Trump political celebrity, is also in the running. Should Bores lose, it might not be solely due to his position on AI. But should Bores win, it would be a clear sign that a position on AI safety might give midterm candidates an edge over their competitors. After all, as the hyper-wired New York Democratic strategist Liz Smith told me in my recent article: “I’m gonna be honest with you, [Bores] wasn’t exactly a well-known quantity prior to becoming a target of these AI companies.”

I’ll be off to Minneapolis on Wednesday to attend the Asian American Journalists Association’s annual conference, and I have a very specific ask: if you’re a Minneapolis resident who is following the downtown data center debate, please get in touch with me at [email protected].