Big Tech Is Spending $125 Million to Crush One State Lawmaker Who Dared to Regulate AI

Q: What Law Triggered This Spending Spree

Bores sponsored the RAISE Act, an AI transparency bill signed into law in December. The law requires AI companies making more than $500 million in revenue to maintain a publicly available safety plan, adhere to it, and report catastrophic safety incidents. By any measure, it is a remarkably light-touch regulation — more disclosure than oversight. Yet even this minimal transparency requirement was enough to mobilize $125 million in opposition. Leading the Future says it wants AI regulation to happen only at the federal level, where the industry's lobbying power is even more concentrated and where comprehensive legislation has stalled for years.

By SaveDelete March 4, 2026 Updated: March 4, 2026

Silicon Valley Declares War on a State Lawmaker

A Silicon Valley-backed super PAC called Leading the Future has raised $125 million to go after state-level politicians who introduce AI legislation. Its first target: New York assembly member Alex Bores, a former Palantir engineer who quit the company over its work with ICE and is now running for Congress in New York's 12th district.

The PAC's backers read like a who's who of the AI industry: Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and AI search startup Perplexity. They have committed to spending at least $10 million specifically against Bores' campaign.

The Irony of the Attack Ads

The attack ads accuse Bores of making hundreds of thousands of dollars building technology for ICE while at Palantir. What they conveniently omit: Bores quit Palantir in 2019 specifically because of its ICE contracts. The ads are funded in part by Palantir's own co-founder, making the attack a masterclass in selective storytelling.

"They're targeting me to make an example of me," Bores told TechCrunch. He believes his technical background — he would be only the second Democrat in Congress with a computer science degree — is precisely why the industry sees him as a threat. He actually understands the technology and cannot be easily dismissed.

What Law Triggered This Spending Spree

Bores sponsored the RAISE Act, an AI transparency bill signed into law in December. The law requires AI companies making more than $500 million in revenue to maintain a publicly available safety plan, adhere to it, and report catastrophic safety incidents. By any measure, it is a remarkably light-touch regulation — more disclosure than oversight.

Yet even this minimal transparency requirement was enough to mobilize $125 million in opposition. Leading the Future says it wants AI regulation to happen only at the federal level, where the industry's lobbying power is even more concentrated and where comprehensive legislation has stalled for years.

The Scale of Big Tech's Political Spending

Leading the Future is not alone. Meta has poured $65 million into two super PACs to elect state-level candidates friendly to the tech industry. AI companies, industry groups, and executives donated at least $83 million in 2025 to federal campaigns and committees.

To put this in perspective, the average New York assembly race raises about $100,000 total. Meta alone is spending 650 times that amount on state races. This is not a seat at the table. This is buying the table, the restaurant, and the building it sits in.

Anthropic Takes the Other Side

In an interesting twist, Anthropic has backed a separate PAC called Public First Action, which is spending $450,000 to support Bores. Public First Action describes itself as pro-AI but with a focus on transparency, safety, and public oversight — positioning itself as the responsible counterweight to the industry's more aggressive players.

The Bottom Line

When an industry mobilizes $125 million to crush a state lawmaker for passing a law that merely requires safety plans and incident reporting, the message is clear: the AI industry does not want any regulation at any level, period. The federal regulation argument is a delay tactic. The attack ads are an intimidation strategy. And the sheer scale of spending — $10 million against one state assembly candidate — reveals an industry that has decided it would rather buy elections than comply with even the most basic transparency requirements. If this does not concern you, it should.