Alex Bores, a 35-year-old New York Assembly member running for Congress, is facing an aggressive super PAC effort aimed at stopping his primary bid. The group, Leading the Future, launched its campaign in late 2025, and Bores said he was prepared for the fight about 10 weeks before the decisive primary.
That makes him an unusual figure in a crowded Democratic field in New York’s 12th District: a state lawmaker with a master’s degree in computer science, a former Palantir employee and one of Albany’s loudest advocates for strict AI rules. Bores won a New York state assembly race in 2022 and later cosponsored New York’s RAISE Act, which became law in 2025 and requires major AI firms to publish safety protocols for their models, among other guardrails.
Leading the Future is bankrolled by OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale and Andreessen Horowitz, among others. The group has described Bores’s approach as ideological and politically motivated legislation that would handcuff not only New York’s, but the entire country’s, ability to lead on AI jobs and innovation.
The fight has a larger edge because the district consistently votes blue, making the Democratic primary the race that matters. Bores is not just taking on rivals Jack Schlossberg, George Conway and Micah Lasher; he is also colliding with a tech industry backlash against one of the state’s clearest efforts to put guardrails around artificial intelligence.
His background gives the clash more force. Before entering politics, Bores worked at Palantir, where he said the company helps organizations use data they already have access to by making it easier to track changes over time, integrate that data and put an ontology on top of it. Now he is arguing that the same tech world that shaped part of his career is spending heavily to defeat him because of the rules he helped write. That is the central break in this race: the candidate the industry knows best is the one it is trying hardest to stop.
