type: timeline_event
By March 3, 2026, reporting confirmed that a super PAC called Leading the Future — backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife Anna Brockman, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and AI search startup Perplexity — had committed to spending at least $10 million to defeat New York Assembly member Alex Bores in the Democratic primary for New York's 12th congressional district. The super PAC had $39 million banked as of the end of 2025, and broader AI industry spending across the 2026 midterms was estimated to exceed $125 million.
Bores had emerged as one of the most consequential AI regulation advocates in any state legislature, authoring legislation in the New York Assembly that would mandate independent safety testing of AI models and create accountability mechanisms for AI systems that cause demonstrable harm. As the primary candidate for the open congressional seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in one of the most reliably Democratic districts in the country, Bores was seen by the AI industry as an existential electoral threat: if elected, he would bring detailed technical expertise and established regulatory ambitions to a Congress that had so far struggled to legislate meaningfully on AI.
The funding sources were particularly notable. Greg Brockman — the president of OpenAI — was personally financing efforts to prevent an AI safety advocate from reaching Congress at the same moment that OpenAI was embroiled in public controversy over its Pentagon deal and its willingness to maintain safety guardrails. Joe Lonsdale, Palantir's co-founder, was funding the effort against a candidate who had quit Palantir in 2019 over its work with ICE — a decision Bores had made on ethical grounds that the super PAC's backers appeared to view as disqualifying.
The ads being run by Leading the Future conspicuously did not mention artificial intelligence. Instead, they focused on unrelated issues, consistent with a broader pattern in AI industry political spending documented by NBC News: industry money was flooding the 2026 election cycle but being used to run general-purpose negative advertising rather than issue-based campaigns, making it difficult for voters to understand that the underlying motive was preserving AI industry freedom from regulation.
A competing super PAC, Public First Action, backed in part by Anthropic, was spending approximately $450,000 in support of Bores — a figure dwarfed by the opposition spending. The disparity illustrated that even within the AI industry, the faction willing to accept accountability frameworks was outgunned by orders of magnitude by the faction determined to prevent regulatory advocates from reaching positions of legislative power.