Anthropic and OpenAI spend $27.41 million in proxy war over New York congressional primary

Alex Bores, a New York state Assemblyman and former tech industry employee, narrowly lost the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District to Assemblyman Micah Lasher on June 23, 2026. Bores finished with 35% of the vote to Lasher’s 39.1%, according to the most recent ballot count cited by The Verge.

The race became a proxy contest after Bores coauthored and successfully passed the RAISE Act, a state law implementing guardrails and safety requirements on frontier AI companies. The legislation drew opposition from Leading the Future, a $100 million super PAC funded in part by OpenAI, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz executives, which spent $8.15 million opposing Bores.

In response, several AI-centric super PACs aligned with Anthropic poured $19.26 million into supporting Bores. These included Jobs and Democracy PAC, Dream NYC, You Can Push Back, and the Guardrails Alliance. The combined spending by both sides totaled $27.41 million, an unusually large sum for a local primary race.

While the AI policy stakes drew national attention, local Manhattan politics likely played the decisive role. Lasher was long viewed as the protégé of retiring Congressman Jerry Nadler and was backed by a super PAC run by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bores’s second-place finish was still seen as a strong showing against two high-profile opponents: Jack Schlossberg, who received 10.8% of the vote, and George Conway, who finished fifth with 7.1%.

Bores framed his campaign’s outcome as a broader political lesson, stating in a post-concession message that the AI industry’s attempt to intimidate opponents had backfired. “They set out to make people afraid to stand up to them. Instead, they learned just how ready people are to push back.”

The broader implications of the spending war extend beyond NY-12. According to Transformer’s campaign finance tracker, AI-aligned super PACs have already spent a combined $50.1 million across 19 states ahead of the 2026 midterms, with the NY-12 primary representing the single most expensive contest to date.