New York’s 12th District race left Leading the Future’s $100 million push in a muddy stalemate: candidate Alex Bores lost to Micah Lasher, but the outcome didn’t prove Big Tech can outspend or outmaneuver an anti–AI backlash—or whether its strategy can keep up
On Tuesday night, the race for New York’s 12th District ended with a result that was supposed to feel like a turning point for AI politics—proof that money could bend the system to Big Tech’s preferred pace.
Alex Bores, a New York Assembly member whose campaign had drawn the attention of a new, pro-AI super PAC, lost his bid.
The campaign was the first big test for a group launched last year by some of America’s leading tech investors. The super PAC. dubbed Leading the Future (LTF). put up $100 million to back candidates described as aligned with the “pro-AI agenda” and to defeat those who weren’t. Bores became LTF’s first target months later.
The conflict centered on New York’s “RAISE Act.” Bores had been its chief sponsor and the bill required developers of frontier AI models to follow various safety protocols or face steep fines. LTF opposed the legislation.
On paper, the message seemed clear: don’t sponsor AI regulations, and your next campaign will drown in opposition spending.
But what happened next didn’t settle the argument so much as muddy it. Headlines portrayed Bores’s defeat as a win for “Big Tech.” Inside the underlying struggle over AI regulation, the reality looked more complicated.
Micah Lasher—Bores’s opponent—won the election.
Lasher is also deeply entangled in the AI policy fight. He co-sponsored the RAISE Act. campaigned on pausing data center construction nationwide. launched antitrust investigations into major AI labs. and said he would protect artists from “AI-driven copyright infringement.” In the debate over AI deployment. he prioritized organized labor’s interests. among other regulatory constraints on the technology.
In his victory speech, Lasher addressed the AI companies that took an unusual interest in the race. He said he “won’t be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs and our families.”
Even with Bores losing, LTF’s hoped-for political lesson for Democrats is unlikely to land—at least not for four reasons that emerge directly from the facts of the campaign.
First, the winner wasn’t friendly to LTF’s position. Lasher’s own record on AI regulation closely tracks what LTF was trying to resist.
Second, it’s not clear the industry spending actually pushed Bores off course. When LTF announced it was targeting Bores. betting markets gave him only a 10 percent chance of victory—behind both Lasher and the Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg. Bores still finished close to the top. coming in a close second and trailing Lasher by only 4 percentage points. or about 4. 000 votes.
There’s also a possibility that LTF’s intervention didn’t weaken Bores so much as elevate him. Ferguson—an adviser who worked with the Bores campaign—said the spending created a kind of political reveal for voters: “For voters. tech billionaires spending millions to beat a state legislator wasn’t a flex; it was a tell.”.
Third, the race turned into more than a grassroots referendum on industry meddling. It became a fight among elements of the tech world itself. Bores was not just a target of Silicon Valley money. He also received massive donations—this time from the portion of the industry that worries about AI safety.
Anthropic, the maker of the chat bot Claude, supported the RAISE Act and, after LTF targeted its law’s chief sponsor, its super PAC rallied to Bores’s support, providing at least $11 million in outside funding. Chris Larsen, the crypto billionaire, added at least $19 million.
The flow of money mattered because it suggests LTF’s move didn’t silence pro-regulation donors—it activated them. Targeting Bores may have made it easier for him to raise money while spotlighting that there is a donor network inside the tech industry supporting regulation, not just rejecting it.
Finally, Lasher’s win may have little to do with AI in the first place. He had been involved in New York politics for about a quarter century longer than Bores, and the narrative of the race placed Lasher as the favorite for more or less the entirety of the campaign.
Even if Lasher favored light-touch AI regulation, his narrow victory over Bores wouldn’t have been proof of anything definitive. Given Lasher’s actual positions on AI, his win doesn’t advance LTF’s case.
Taken together, the election’s outcome left LTF with less clarity than it came in with—an embarrassment for a strategy built on the promise that political spending can settle the argument.
Behind the campaign, the broader climate was also changing.
Since LTF launched last year, the national mood has turned sharply against the kind of approach the group backs. A recent Fox News poll found that 80 percent of respondents said they favored regulating AI to protect public interests. even if it slows innovation. Other surveys also show a large majority of Americans opposing the construction of new data centers in their areas.
And public opinion wasn’t the only pressure point. The White House also signaled a more interventionist stance. Earlier this month, the White House released an executive order encouraging labs to seek the government’s approval before releasing new models.
Weeks later, the Trump administration took what was described as an extraordinary step: it essentially ordered Anthropic to remove its Fable model from the market on national security grounds.
That move, by the account here, was a more radical and capricious intrusion into the AI industry than the RAISE Act ever contemplated.
LTF’s own messaging reflects the shift. When it first targeted Bores, it lambasted the RAISE Act as a “clear example of the patchwork, uninformed, and bureaucratic state laws that would slow American progress and open the door for China to win the global race for AI leadership.”
Last month, the super PAC said it actually supported the RAISE Act, describing it as getting the combination of innovation and safety right.
LTF tried to square the contradiction by arguing that while Bores’s initial draft of the legislation was ruinous, the final version was excellent.
But the substance of that reconciliation doesn’t appear to persuade everyone. The RAISE Act did get watered down before enactment. Still. the claim that the changes were large enough to transform the bill from catastrophic national sabotage into a model of pro-innovation lawmaking is portrayed as implausible here.
And it’s not just the policy’s final form that complicates LTF’s posture. The group spent months lobbying the federal government to preempt New York’s law.
In the end, Bores’s defeat didn’t resolve the argument. It delivered the kind of muddied outcome LTF’s backers may not have expected: a candidate they tried to unseat lost decisively. but the winner wasn’t an opponent of regulation. The spending didn’t create a clean political story that light-touch advocates could point to and win with.
The political winds have moved, and LTF’s stance appears to have shifted with them. What remains, after Tuesday night, is a standoff—between visions of AI’s future that don’t line up neatly with money, or with the idea that a single election can settle the country’s direction.
AI regulation Leading the Future Alex Bores Micah Lasher RAISE Act Anthropic Claude data centers antitrust investigations executive order Fable model