If you’ve seen the recent ads attacking New York assembly member Alex Bores, you’ll know that he used to work for Palantir, the AI ​​company that intensifying controversial invasions and a high number of deportation efforts from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The ads further accuse Bores of making hundreds of thousands of dollars building technology for ICE and “expediting their deportations.”

But that’s not the whole story. “I quit Palantir primarily for its work on ICE in 2019,” Bores told TechCrunch on last week’s episode of Equity.

Now he’s running for New York’s 12th congressional district, with Big Tech billionaires funding outside groups targeting his campaign.

Ads are funded in a super PAC called Leading the Future, which, ironically, has the support of Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, as well as OpenAI President Greg Brockman, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI search startup Perplexity, and other Silicon Valley heavy-hitters. The PAC has raised $125 million to pursue candidates in state elections who introduce AI legislation and to support candidates who have a light-to-no-touch approach to regulating AI.

“They have committed to spending at least $10 million against me…because they know I am their greatest threat in their quest for unfettered control over the American workforce, our children’s minds, our climate and our utility bills,” Bores said. “They targeted me to make an example of me.”

He says his background working in tech, including Palantir and several startups, is exactly why Future Leadership made him a prime target.

“I actually understand technology very well and I can’t be dismissed because this guy doesn’t understand it at all,” Bores said, adding that if elected, he would be the second Democrat in Congress with a degree in computer science.

Bores earned the wrath of Silicon Valley after sponsoring the RAISE Act, an AI transparency bill signed into law in December. The law requires many AI labs — especially those making more than $500 million in revenue — to have a public safety plan in place, to follow it, and to report when a safety hazard occurs.

It’s the kind of light-touch legislation that can kill other industries — more disclosure and planning than proactive management.

Bores says he doesn’t believe Leading the Future wants to see any regulation of AI, unless, as the PAC says, it’s at the federal level. Last year, the states fight against the industry to protect their rights to regulate AI in the absence of a federal standard. In December, President Trump signed a executive order directs federal agencies to challenge “burdensome” state AI laws, such as Bores’ RAISE Act.

Bores pointed out his campaign proposed national AI governance blueprint — covering eight issue areas and 43 policy recommendations — adds that anyone serious about federal AI regulation should support him. He also introduced legislation that would force companies to disclose what is in their training data and to embed metadata standards that would make it easier to track synthetic content.

Leading the Future isn’t the only Silicon Valley-backed PAC involved in the midterms. Posted by Meta $65 million to two super PACs — American Technology Excellence Project and Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (Meta) California — to elect state-level candidates friendly to the AI ​​and tech industry. And AI companies, industry groups, and top executives are donating at least $83 million in 2025 to federal campaigns and committees.

“It’s not a ‘We want to have a side of the conversation,'” Bores said. “It was: ‘We want to intimidate elected officials and browbeat anyone who disagrees with us.’

“The average New York assembly race raises maybe $100,000 in total, maybe less,” Bores continued. “For a company (Meta) to spend $65 million on state races, let alone everything they do in Congress — I think it’s hard for people to understand how that’s out of the ordinary.”

For his part, Bores has secured the support of a separate Anthropic-backed PAC called Public First Action, which is spend $450,000 in the New Yorker. Public First Action also describes itself as pro-AI, but with a focus on transparency, safety, and public oversight.

Future’s leadership, he said, represents “a very small minority of voices” who see any regulation as a threat to AI development and who “just want to leave it alone.” Of the Bores based on supporters tech workers at the very companies whose leaders want to block his campaign — a part of a wider pattern at the grassroots organizing within technology companies in what way AI is deployed and who serves it.

At the other end of the spectrum is the minority of people who “want to pretend AI never existed and put the genie back in the bottle and burn down all the data centers,” Bores said.

He thinks most Americans are somewhere in the middle: they use AI and see its potential but worry about how fast it’s moving.

“(They’re) wondering if the government is up to the task of making sure we have a future that benefits the many instead of the few,” Bores said.