Anthropic and OpenAI's $27M AI Proxy War Ends in a Draw as Alex Bores Loses New York Primary

A $27 Million Spending Blitz with No Clear Winner

The battle over New York Assemblyman Alex Bores’s candidacy for Congress became the most expensive proxy war yet waged by rival AI companies over a single candidate. According to The Verge, super PACs connected to Anthropic and OpenAI combined to spend $27.41 million on the New York 12th District Democratic primary—a sum dwarfing typical expenditures in local races. The contest pitted Bores, architect of New York’s RAISE Act safety legislation, against Micah Lasher in an election that emerged as a national test of AI industry political clout. Bores narrowly lost, finishing second with 35% to Lasher’s 39.1%, signaling that even unprecedented venture-backed spending cannot guarantee victory against entrenched local power structures.

The AI Regulation Flashpoint

Bores entered the race as a lightning rod for competing visions of AI governance. According to The Verge, the Assemblyman had coauthored and successfully passed the RAISE Act, which imposed guardrails and safety requirements on frontier AI companies; a version became New York state law. This alignment with regulatory restraint made him a natural target for Leading the Future, a $100 million super PAC backing deregulation that was partially funded by OpenAI, Palantir, and executives from Andreessen Horowitz. The PAC spent $8.15 million against Bores.

Conversely, Anthropic-aligned super PACs saw Bores as a standard-bearer for responsible AI development. According to The Verge, four pro-Bores groups—Jobs and Democracy PAC, Dream NYC, You Can Push Back, and the Guardrails Alliance—collectively deployed $19.26 million to support his candidacy. Public First, which backed Jobs and Democracy PAC, contributed $20 million to the effort.

Local Machine Politics Trumped National AI Money

Despite the outsized spending, traditional forces proved decisive. Lasher, the 35-year-old victor, benefited from backing by Michael Bloomberg, New York’s billionaire former mayor, and the endorsement of retiring Congressman Jerry Nadler, whose seat was being vacated. According to The Verge, Lasher was long viewed as Nadler’s political heir. Notably, Lasher himself had coauthored the RAISE Act alongside Bores, meaning the race was not strictly a regulatory showdown—both finalists supported safety guardrails.

The field also included Jack Schlossberg, grandson of President John F. Kennedy, who finished third with 10.8%, and George Conway, the anti-Trump Republican lawyer, who unexpectedly finished fifth with 7.1%, behind Nina Schwalbe.

Why This Matters

The Bores race reveals a structural limitation in AI industry political influence: national money and narrative cannot reliably override local political establishment endorsements and machine politics. For Anthropic and its allies, the $19.26 million investment failed to overcome Bloomberg’s establishment machine and Nadler’s hand-picked successor. For OpenAI’s deregulation coalition, the spending advantage in total ($100 million PAC budget) was irrelevant when concentrated in a single race.

Going forward, this outcome should recalibrate expectations for AI industry political spending in the 2026 midterms. If Bores—a sympathetic figure with a legislative track record in AI governance—could not overcome local factors with nearly $20 million in direct support, then AI firms attempting to influence Senate or gubernatorial races will need to build broader coalitions and do deeper local political work. The bellwether signal appears to be that money matters, but machine matters more.