The air inside the fifth-floor room at the New York Society for Ethical Culture smelled of old paper and trapped heat. Outside, Manhattan was a humid, ninety-five-degree pressure cooker. Inside, a few hundred hyper-engaged voters from the Upper West Side sat on wooden chairs, fanning themselves with pamphlets, waiting to hear from the people who wanted to represent them in Washington.
On the stage sat the contenders for New York’s 12th Congressional District. There was a Kennedy grandson with a famous silhouette, a veteran state strategist backed by the party establishment, and a fierce anti-Trump litigator. You might also find this connected story interesting: The Illusion of Tech Supremacy and the Fall of Unit 8200.
Then there was Alex Bores.
He sat there with the posture of someone who spent his formative years looking at compiler errors. At thirty-five, Bores is a New York State Assemblyman, but his brain operates on a different architecture. He holds a master’s degree in computer science. He used to write code for Palantir. When he speaks about politics, his vocabulary occasionally trips over terms like "compression algorithm." As discussed in recent articles by TechCrunch, the implications are notable.
But Bores is not just running against the other humans on that stage. He is the centerpiece of a multi-million-dollar experiment designed to see if Silicon Valley can buy an veto over the future of American technology.
An invisible war is playing out across the airwaves of Manhattan, paid for by people who live three thousand miles away. On one side, a super PAC called Leading the Future—funded by executives with ties to OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz—has dropped millions of dollars into a scorched-earth campaign to destroy Bores’s political career. On the other side, Anthropic, a rival artificial intelligence company that positions itself as the "safe and responsible" alternative, alongside crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, has poured in $4.59 million to keep him alive.
It is the first true AI proxy war in American political history. The prize isn't just a single seat under the rotunda of the Capitol. It is the right to write the rules for the most powerful technology humanity has ever created.
The Bill on the Governor's Desk
To understand why billionaires in Menlo Park are spending fortunes on a local primary in New York, you have to look at what Bores did before he ran for Congress. He authored something called the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act—the RAISE Act.
It is a piece of legislation that terrifies the libertarian wing of Silicon Valley. Signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul, it is set to take effect on January 1, 2027. It does not merely suggest guidelines; it imposes strict, legally binding transparency and reporting requirements on large-scale artificial intelligence models.
Consider the reality of what these models are becoming. They are no longer just predictive text engines or novelty image generators. They are infrastructure. The RAISE Act focuses specifically on what Bores calls "catastrophic risks"—the terrifyingly real possibility of a closed-source model being used to synthesize a novel bioweapon or a system escaping human control entirely.
"This is the first technology ever," Bores told an interviewer recently, his voice flat with the calm certainty of an engineer, "in which the people who are building it have explicitly said their goal is to build something that can replace all human labor."
That statement is not hyperbole. It is the stated mission statement of Artificial General Intelligence. But while the tech titans see a grand evolution toward a post-labor utopia, a middle-class family in Manhattan sees an eviction notice.
The fear is palpable. You can hear it in the questions from the retirees at the League of Women Voters forums. They aren't asking about science fiction scenarios; they are asking about deepfakes destroying their grandchildren’s reputations, algorithmic surveillance tracking their movements, and AI hiring tools quietly filtering their children out of the job market before a human resume reviewer ever sees their name.
Bores treats these fears not as abstract philosophical dilemmas, but as engineering bugs that require immediate patches. Take deepfakes. To him, the panic surrounding fake audio and video is entirely unnecessary.
"Deepfakes are an incredibly solvable problem," he insists. "We just have to do it."
He points to an open-source, industry-standard metadata protocol called C2PA. If embedded by default into the hardware of every smartphone and camera, C2PA creates an unalterable digital watermark proving whether a piece of media was captured by a physical lens or manufactured by a server farm in Virginia. The technology exists. It is free. It is sitting on a shelf.
The only reason it isn’t universal is a lack of political will. Silicon Valley has no incentive to slow down its development pipelines to implement it voluntarily. It requires a regulator who understands the math behind the machine to force their hand.
And that is exactly why the industry is trying to erase him from politics.
The Heavy Price of Green Power
The conflict deepens when you look at the raw physical reality of artificial intelligence. We tend to think of the "cloud" as something ethereal, a weightless digital ether floating above our heads. It isn't. It is an insatiable, roaring engine made of steel, copper, and silicon, housed in massive concrete data centers that pull immense amounts of juice from the electrical grid.
Every single query run through a frontier model requires water to cool the servers and electricity to turn the transistors. The current trajectory of AI development is an environmental nightmare, threatening to swallow the progress made toward carbon neutrality over the last two decades.
Bores’s platform includes a condition that makes tech executives wince: if you want to build and run massive AI clusters, you must bring your own green energy. You must build the wind farms and solar arrays required to run your machines rather than cannibalizing the public grid and driving up utility bills for everyday citizens.
But implementing that kind of oversight requires a federal government that isn't easily dazzled by tech billionaires bearing gifts. It requires a Congress that doesn't look at a smartphone as if it were a magic brick.
Right now, Washington is profoundly ill-equipped for this fight. The average age in the House of Representatives hovers near sixty. Many lawmakers still struggle with basic digital literacy, let alone the nuances of neural network weights or data poisoning. If Bores wins, he will be one of only three members of Congress with a formal degree in computer science. He would represent a profound existential threat to the status quo of tech lobbying: an insider who cannot be lied to by a corporate vice president.
The Human Cost of the Machine
There is a quiet irony to Bores’s position. He is not a Luddite. He doesn't hate the technology. He uses it every day to organize his congressional schedule and parse lengthy legislative briefs. Last year, just for fun, he sat down and coded an alternative version of Google Maps that integrated the erratic real-time arrival schedule of the Roosevelt Island tram. He understands the joy of creation that drives the engineers in Silicon Valley.
But he also remembers why he left them.
Years ago, while working as an engineer at Palantir, Bores reached a breaking point over the moral implications of the software he was helping to build. When the company’s data-mining tools were deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement to facilitate mass workplace raids and family separations, he didn't just quietly object. He resigned.
That choice defined the trajectory of his life. It grounded his understanding of technology in its human consequences. Software isn't neutral. It takes on the biases, the flaws, and the cruelty of the people who fund it and the data used to train it.
Now, that same industry is coming back for him. The millions pouring into New York’s 12th District through Leading the Future aren't being spent on nuanced debates about algorithmic transparency. They are being spent on slick, highly targeted attack ads designed to muddy the waters, to make Bores look risky, or to simply drown out his voice in a sea of political noise.
The tech titans are learning how to use the American primary system as a regulatory filter. If you can defeat a skeptic in a low-turnout June primary, you never have to face them in a congressional hearing room in October.
The voters walking out of the Society for Ethical Culture into the heavy Manhattan evening heat are left to decide something far larger than a local political squabble. They are deciding who holds the leash of the machine.
As the forum ended, Bores stood on the sidewalk, watching the crowds stream toward the subway stations. A reporter asked him to summarize the race in just a few words. He hesitated for a long moment, his eyes tracking the taillights of the yellow cabs bouncing down Central Park West.
"Who gets power," he said quietly. "That’s it. Who gets power."
The city hummed around him, an endless grid of human lives, completely unaware of the cold code trying to rewrite their future from the top down.
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