Key Takeaways:
The AI industry's $100m political war chest has turned a single Manhattan congressional primary into a proxy battle over how aggressively the US should regulate artificial intelligence.
AI-focused Super Pacs have raised roughly $100m this election cycle and spent $44m across dozens of congressional races, with nearly half that sum — more than $20m — concentrated on New York's 12th District Democratic primary, according to Federal Election Commission data. The race pits state Assemblymember Alex Bores, who sponsored New York's landmark RAISE Act requiring AI developers to publish safety plans, against fellow Assemblymember Micah Lasher and John F. Kennedy grandson Jack Schlossberg.
"The message Leading the Future was sending was: regulate AI, and we will find you, wherever you are," Brad Carson, president of Public First Action and a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma, said. Public First Action has spent $11m supporting Bores, countering an $8.2m attack blitz from Leading the Future, a Super Pac backed by venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman.
Leading the Future's $75m war chest — funded by just four donors — advocates for a single federal AI framework rather than a patchwork of state laws, which tech firms warn would create a compliance minefield that hands the AI race to China. On the other side, Public First Action has received $20m from Anthropic, the AI company that markets itself as the industry's conscience while racing to build powerful models. The group has raised another $45m from donors including employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and X, Carson said.
The outcome of Tuesday's primary will signal whether AI safety legislation is a winning or losing political platform, with implications for the $200bn-plus AI infrastructure buildout underway across the US. A YouGov poll found two-thirds of US voters believe AI is advancing too quickly, while only one in five expect its economic impact to be positive — views held evenly across party lines.
The Two Camps and Their Money
Leading the Future, founded in August, has positioned itself as the pro-innovation voice, backing candidates who support federal preemption of state AI laws. Its co-leader Josh Vlasto said the Pac "supports passing a national regulatory framework for AI that creates jobs for American workers, helps America win the race against China, and includes strong guardrails." Beyond NY-12, the group has spent millions in primaries across Utah, Texas, Ohio, Georgia and Kentucky — many centered on rural data center buildouts facing local backlash.
Public First Action, the Democrat-focused arm of the Public First network, has taken the opposite approach, arguing that safety must be designed into AI models from the start. "Regulating the outputs long after said problem has arisen does very little justice to the people who are harmed by the AI," Carson said. The group has spent $1.6m backing Representative Valerie Foushee, who co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI, and $300,000 supporting Representative Josh Gottheimer, the other co-chair — meaning two-thirds of the Democrats' AI policy leadership is now backed by Anthropic-funded money.
The Bores Effect
Bores, a former Palantir data scientist and engineer, has turned his campaign into a referendum on whether AI can be regulated at all. "We can invest in AI that's meant to help doctors diagnose disease without encouraging the AI that's helping healthcare deny claims," he said while campaigning outside a Manhattan subway stop. Polls show him in a tight race with Lasher, who also voted for the RAISE Act but did not sponsor it.
The ad war has drawn in additional players. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen gave $3m to You Can Push Back, a Super Pac supporting Bores. A new group called Guardrails Alliance, backed by labor unions and former Indeed CEO Chris Hyams, launched Thursday explicitly to counter Leading the Future. It will not accept corporate money, a spokesperson said.
The Crypto Playbook, Repurposed
The AI industry's political strategy borrows directly from crypto's 2024 playbook, when more than $200m in Pac money helped crypto-aligned candidates win the overwhelming majority of targeted races. But AI faces a harder sell: crypto had millions of retail investors with direct financial stakes, while AI is broadly unpopular. The YouGov poll showed only one in five voters expect positive economic impact from AI.
Brookings has named New York City the country's most "AI-exposed" county, where a fifth of the workforce holds jobs AI could plausibly replace — predominantly white-collar roles like software developers, marketers and financial analysts. That concentration makes NY-12 a potential bellwether for how AI-vulnerable voters will reward or punish candidates on the issue.
For investors, the regulatory stakes are enormous. A federal framework could accelerate AI infrastructure spending by removing state-by-state compliance uncertainty, benefiting hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. A state-led patchwork, by contrast, would raise compliance costs and potentially slow model deployment — a headwind for AI companies planning initial public offerings that could raise billions.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
