New York City House primary becomes main front in AI civil strife

The artificial intelligence industry has poured $49 million into the 2026 midterm elections so far, part of a broader push to shape the first generation of laws governing the technology. According to Federal Election Commission data, AI-focused Super Pacs have raised more than $100 million this cycle, with half of all spending concentrated on a single Manhattan race: Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New York’s 12th congressional district.

The Manhattan Battlefield

The contest in NY-12 has become the unlikely crucible of the industry’s fight over regulation, largely because of one candidate: Democratic assemblymember Alex Bores. A former tech professional who worked at Palantir Technologies, Bores sponsored the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, or RAISE Act, the second-ever US state law requiring major AI developers to publish public safety plans and report safety incidents. Signed in December 2025, the law made Bores a target.

By August 2025, his congressional campaign was under siege. Attack ads funded by Think Big, an affiliate of the pro-AI Super Pac network Leading the Future, flooded television, text messages and mail. The group has spent $8.2 million on the primary alone, according to FEC filings. Bores, once considered the underdog, now polls in a close race with fellow assemblymember Micah Lasher, who also campaigns for AI guardrails and curbing Big Tech’s influence. “This is the first congressional race in the country where the dividing line is: can we regulate AI at all?” Bores says in a campaign video.

The Two War Chests

The fight for NY-12 is a proxy war between two opposing Super Pac networks, each representing a distinct vision for AI governance. Leading the Future, a new bipartisan network created to back “pro-AI” candidates, advocates for a federal regulatory framework and warns that a patchwork of state laws would cede the AI race to China. Its $75 million war chest is funded by just four donors: venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, and his wife, Anna. Other backers, according to reports, include Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. The network’s strategy is reportedly modelled on the pro-cryptocurrency group Fairshake, focusing on broader voter concerns such as economic opportunity and immigration rather than explicit AI messaging.

Leading the Future’s anti-Bores blitz triggered a counter-assault by a different set of Super Pacs advocating for stronger AI safeguards. Chief among them is Public First, a network of Super Pacs founded by former Democratic congressman Brad Carson. Its subsidiaries include Jobs and Democracy, which has backed Bores, and You Can Push Back, funded by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen. Public First’s funding is murky — the dark-money group that bankrolls it is not required to disclose its donors — but the AI company Anthropic has publicly announced a $20 million contribution. Carson says Public First has raised another $45 million from various industries, including “people who actually are currently working at the labs, from OpenAI to Google DeepMind to X.”

Carson interprets Leading the Future’s message as a direct threat: “Regulate AI, and we will find you, wherever you are.” A former Andreessen Horowitz general partner made much the same case in a New York Times op-ed last week, accusing the industry of trying to intimidate anyone who engages “too aggressively” with AI governance. Leading the Future did not respond to a request for comment. Combined, the two networks and their allies have spent nearly $16 million on the NY-12 race, with Public First’s ads claiming “rightwing billionaires” are trying to buy the seat while Bores is “standing up to Big Tech”. “It’s turned the race into the AI civil war,” Carson said.

Geography has amplified the conflict. NY-12 leans heavily Democratic, whereas Leading the Future is led by Trump-aligned tech executives. Brookings has named New York City the country’s most “AI-exposed” county, where a fifth of the workforce do jobs AI could plausibly take — predominantly white-collar roles such as software developers, marketers and financial analysts. Brookings calls places like it potential “hotbeds for some of the AI era’s most agitated voters”.

The Broader Landscape

Beyond Manhattan, Public First has focused on supporting candidates advocating for AI advancement — sometimes in ways that blur the lines of its stated mission. It gave nearly $1 million to Utah congresswoman Celeste Maloy, a Republican who has pushed bipartisan legislation to crack down on deepfakes while lobbying for more data centres in the state. In Texas, it spent $1.5 million supporting House candidate Carlos De La Cruz, who says he is “committed to ensuring the United States wins the AI race against China” and wants to roll back green energy rules. And it gave $800,000 to Oklahoma congressman Kevin Hern, who also took money from Leading the Future, the network Public First was formed to fight.

Meanwhile, Public First has invested heavily in candidates overseeing AI legislation. It has put $1.6 million behind Representative Valerie Foushee, who co-chairs the House Democratic Commission on AI. Another co-chair, Representative Josh Gottheimer, ran a $300,000 Public First-funded ad campaign warning of AI harms. Two-thirds of the Democrats’ AI policy leadership, in other words, is now backed by a Super Pac funded primarily by Anthropic. Among the House races seeing the most cash from both networks are those at the centre of rural data-centre rollouts in Utah, Texas, Ohio, Georgia and Kentucky, despite local backlash.

The playbook mirrors crypto’s 2024 run, when more than $200 million in Pac money helped crypto-aligned candidates win the overwhelming majority of targeted races — including the $40 million campaign that sank Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio. But AI lacks crypto’s voter base: during the last election, millions of investors stood to gain directly from a president who vowed to make the US “the crypto capital of the planet”. Research suggests AI is politically unpopular. A YouGov poll found two-thirds of US voters believe it is advancing too quickly, while only one in five think its economic impact will be positive — views held evenly across party lines. “The dynamics of Wall Street and the opaque sense of elites making decisions about us that don’t benefit us — I think AI companies are increasingly being seen in a similar light, whether you’re on the right or the left,” said generative AI expert Henry Ajder. He added that even the most cautious executives are competing in an AI race that creates a “constant pressure to release new models quickly”.

On Thursday, another AI-focused Super Pac launched: Guardrails Alliance, explicitly built to counter Leading the Future. Its backers include several labour unions and Chris Hyams, the former Indeed CEO who stepped down last year over AI concerns. It will not take corporate money, a spokesperson said.