AI Billionaires’ 2026 Intimidation Campaign Is Already Working

AI Billionaires’ 2026 Intimidation Campaign Is Already Working

Tessa Stuart

Fri, December 12, 2025 at 4:00 PM UTC

7 min read

The titans of artificial intelligence have fired the first shot in a regulation battle that is poised to dominate the 2026 midterms, and the industry’s prospects for victory are already looking good.

On Thursday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul gutted a bill intended to put modest AI protections in place, hours before President Donald Trump issued an executive order intended to stamp out state laws like the one Hochul is now seeking to weaken.

Hochul’s apparent capitulation to the AI industry came just a day after the AI industry PAC Leading the Future — which boasts a $100 million slush fund bankrolled by OpenAI President Greg Brockman and the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others — released its first ad of the 2026 cycle, attacking New York Assemblyman Alex Bores, who sponsored the bill in question and is part of a crowded field of Democrats running to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in Congress.

Bores, the political ad’s ominous narrator intones, “wants Albany bureaucrats regulating AI — the same dysfunctional Albany that can’t balance a budget or keep businesses in New York.” The voice goes on to namecheck the RAISE Act, which Bores helped author. According to the attack ad, the legislation Bores sponsored will create “a chaotic patchwork of state rules that would CRUSH INNOVATION, COST NEW YORK JOBS and FAIL TO KEEP PEOPLE SAFE.”

The ad, which was shared with journalists but does not appear to have run as a paid ad on any platform, is supposedly the first of many the PAC intends to run against Bores for his role sponsoring the New York bill, which would require the largest AI companies to publish their safety and risk protocols and alert authorities to serious safety incidents. The legislation would also impose fines on companies that fail to meet its standards.

“Frankly, I wasn’t surprised,” Bores says of when he found out he was being targeted by the PAC.

A computer engineer before he got into politics, Bores had already begun to feel heat from the industry while working to author the bill — even after he actively solicited feedback from the biggest AI labs while crafting the legislation. “We had really productive conversations. We didn’t always agree, but they made a bunch of suggestions for the bill — some of which I incorporated, and some of which I did not,” he says, adding that things changed when the bill entered committee and it was clear that it might actually pass. Suddenly, his constituents were getting spammed with texts and inundated with social media ads against him.

When he saw the ad that Leading the Future shared this week, Bores says he recognized immediately it was not just about him, but an attempt to intimidate another politician: Governor Kathy Hochul: “My reaction was, ‘Oh, this is a message to the governor’ — this is not just about defeating me.”

On Tuesday, the day before the ad appeared in new stories, Hochul started the clock on the two-week “chapter amendment” process that will determine whether or not she signs the RAISE Act into law. “They want the governor to be intimidated by the idea they might target her next,” Bores says. Hochul is up for reelection in 2026.

As Rolling Stone recently reported, the AI industry PAC is borrowing this election cycle from the same playbook cryptocurrency lobbyists used in 2024: aggressively targeting a select number of candidates and spending lavishly against them as a demonstration of the political pain they can inflict on candidates who are perceived as against them, and simultaneously boosting candidates they view as allies, while barely mentioning AI at all. (Chris Lehane, who helped successfully execute that strategy on behalf of the crypto industry while at Coinbase in 2024, is now chief global affairs officer at OpenAI.)

Bores is one of nine candidates who have declared their intention to replace Nadler, who has represented New York’s 12 District, which comprises a sizable chunk of Manhattan, for 36 years. So far, the field includes the Instagram-famous Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, the 25-year-old Parkland shooting survivor and March for Our Lives co-founder Cameron Kasky, City Councilman Erik Bottcher, and former NPR host Jami Floyd, among others. (Onetime CNN anchor Don Lemon and lawyer George Conway, ex-husband of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, have floated test balloons.)

In such a crowded primary, the amount of money that the PAC has at its disposal could make a big difference. But Bores doesn’t seem particularly unnerved. From his perspective, the spending is only serving to elevate his work to put regulations on AI — work that he says is broadly popular with voters. “Eighty-four percent of New Yorkers support the RAISE Act and 80 percent of Americans want reasonable regulations on AI,” Bores says.

AI, he adds, “is naturally becoming a thing that voters care more about because it’s impacting more of their life day-to-day — whether that’s through layoffs, or their company refusing to hire more; whether that’s through their utility bills with data centers coming online; whether that’s the impact on their kids and chat bots. … This probably wasn’t a topic people were asking a lot about a few years ago, it has certainly become much more of a topic now.”

Bores likes to say that he is “the first Democrat elected in New York state at any level with a degree in computer science,” a fact he finds “10 percent cool, and 90 percent horrifying.” That degree is, specifically, a masters in computer science with a specialization in machine learning. Bores worked in the industry for a decade — including a stint at Palantir, whose co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is a major contributor to the PAC funding the campaign against him.

At the same time they are attacking Bores, tech titans are working to woo politicians who could be persuaded to support their cause.

On Thursday, Transformer was first to report that Hochul moved to significantly weaken Bores’ bill. “The governor’s proposal would strike the RAISE Act in its entirety and replace it with verbatim language from California’s recently enacted law, SB 53, with minimal changes,” reporter Issie Lapowsky writes.

The California bill was softened significantly at the last minute, with input from the same figures behind Leading the Future.

State legislators would need to agree to Hochul’s mark-up — an outcome which seems unlikely — before the governor could sign the bill into law. If the mark-up stands, however, it would be a major boon for the AI industry: two of the biggest and most important states setting a shared ceiling on potential regulation.

In a statement, a Hochul spokesperson said, “In the absence of federal leadership on responsible AI, New York is leading with common-sense laws to protect children, families, and consumers and our approach should be a model for the nation. Governor Hochul has been at the forefront of the innovation economy and remains committed to advancing AI responsibly as she reviews the legislation.”

Following Trump’s announcement of his executive order later on Thursday, which seeks to bar state regulations in favor of federal standards, Bores released a statement of his own.

“Let’s be clear about what just happened: a handful of AI oligarchs bribed Donald Trump into selling out America’s future and intimidating states who want to put even basic guardrails on the most powerful technology ever created,” the candidate wrote. “Trump isn’t just ignoring potential dangers from out-of-control AI development; he’s throwing the door wide open for them. That’s why we need more members of Congress who will install necessary guardrails before it’s too late.”

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