“Alex Bores. Wrong on AI. Wrong for Congress,” warned an attack ad launched last week in New York. The Democratic contender for a Manhattan House seat fired back in an online video, filmed as he walked down a city street.
“AI billionaires, go have fun,” said Bores, a state assemblyman whom the ad accused of threatening innovation by sponsoring a state bill that would require large AI companies to publish safety data on their technology. “We’re standing up for New Yorkers.”
The exchange was the opening skirmish in a battle set to play out across the country as super PACs backed by Trump-supporting tech moguls and the social network giant Meta try to use the 2026 midterms to reengineer Congress and state legislatures in favor of their ambitions for artificial intelligence.
The groups aim to wrest control of the public narrative around AI, just as politicians in both parties have started warning that the industry is moving too fast.
The largest of the pro-AI super PACs, Leading the Future, has a war chest of more than $100 million from prominent investors and executives. It has an affiliated nonprofit that launched a $10 million campaign last month pressuring Congress to pass regulation that would unleash American AI companies to innovate faster and challenge China.
The Silicon Valley push hopes to dramatically extend the gains the tech industry has reaped from the second term of President Donald Trump. He has struck down AI restrictions introduced by his predecessor Joe Biden and last week signed an executive order threatening to sue states that pass laws on AI. State lawmakers introduced more than 1,000 laws regulating AI in 2025, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
By knocking down candidates such as Bores, who favor regulations, and boosting industry sympathizers, the tech-backed groups could signal to incumbents and candidates nationwide that opposing the tech industry can jeopardize their electoral chances.
“Bores just happened to be first, but he’s not the last, and he’s certainly not the only,” said Josh Vlasto, co-head of Leading the Future, the bipartisan super PAC behind the ad.
The group plans to support and oppose candidates in congressional and state elections next year. It will also fund rapid response operations against voices in the industry pushing for more oversight. The super PAC is funded by tech elites, including the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose co-founder Marc Andreessen is a Trump adviser and supporter; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, a friend to Vice President JD Vance; and the president of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Greg Brockman, and his wife.
The strategy aims to replicate the success of the cryptocurrency industry, which used a super PAC to clear a path for Congress this summer to boost the sector’s fortunes with the passage of the GENIUS Act.
The crypto industry’s reputation had previously plummeted after fraud convictions at crypto exchange FTX in 2023. To fix it, investors and companies backed a super PAC called Fairshake that aggressively challenged candidates who didn’t back its agenda. The group helped defeat left-leaning Democrats, spending $10 million to defeat former Rep. Katie Porter in California and $40 million to stymie then-Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
Some of the same powerful players are now working with Leading the Future, including Andreessen Horowitz. Reusing the Fairshake playbook makes sense, Vlasto said, because if you don’t push Congress to do something, it won’t. But signs voters are increasingly wary of artificial intelligence suggest that approach may be challenging to replicate.
More than half of Americans believe AI poses a high risk to society, Pew Research Center found in a June survey. As AI usage continues to grow, more people are being warned by chief executives that AI will disrupt their jobs, seeing power-hungry data centers spring up in their towns or hearing claims that chatbots can harm mental health.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle are attempting to channel AI angst into a campaign platform, pitching voters on safeguarding children from chatbots or opposing new data centers.
Republican division over the AI industry in the Senate in July killed a bid, backed by some of Trump’s tech allies, to pass a 10-year federal moratorium on state AI laws.
The president’s more recent moves to block state AI regulation triggered pushback from major Republican figures including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and conservative commentator Stephen K. Bannon, who complained that the president’s coziness with tech figures risked alienating his base amidvoter frustration with rising energy bills.
Virginia state Sen. John McAuliff (D) last month flipped a seat that had been Republican for nearly 30 years, after running ads that tapped into concerns about data center construction. “The size and the scale of these companies and the size and the scale of the investments that they were willing to make versus the actual returns that our community has been getting — people understood that that is off kilter,” he said.
The day after Leading the Future was announced in August, Meta revealed its own super PAC, the social media giant’s first since Facebook launched in 2004. The company announced a second super PAC in September. The bipartisan effort is also focused on AI policy and preventing state laws from creating a patchwork of rules, but it will operate independently of Leading the Future, said Meta spokeswoman Rachel Holland. One will operate solely in California and the other across multiple states.
Meta has donated “tens of millions” to each group, Holland said.
Vlasto of Leading the Future said it is starting with four states expected to be key policy battlegrounds that have active state bills on AI: New York, California, Illinois and Ohio.
He said that in addition to advocating for federal preemption of state AI laws, the group wants a national regulatory framework for AI. Andreessen Horowitz on Wednesday published AI policy proposals that would largely restrict states to regulating the technology for consumer protection reasons like child safety and insurance fraud.
Vlasto said Bores was targeted because he is tied to a political movement intended to slow American progress on AI technology.
The New York candidate has made enacting federal regulation on AI part of his pitch to midterms voters as he vies to succeed retiring fellow Democrat Rep. Jerry Nadler. Bores raised $1.2 million in the 15 hours after launching his campaign in October, according to a post on his Instagram account.
Financial disclosures for those donations have not been released, but Bores spokesperson Alyssa Cass said, “No AI billionaires or oligarchs have given to his campaign. And he isn’t taking PAC money.”
Candidates like Bores targeted by the pro-AI political groups may get extra support from two super PACs that former congressman Brad Carson (D-Oklahoma) said he plans to launch as part of an effort to counter the industry’s big political spenders. He is president of Americans for Responsible Innovation, a bipartisan AI policy think tank.
Carson said his bipartisan super PACs will intervene in midterms races targeted by Leading the Future or Meta’s PACs to level the playing field for candidates who champion AI transparency and protecting Americans from the technology’s worst risks. He said he plans to raise money from groups interested in enhancing guardrails on AI, including people who work in the AI industry.
“I would hope — and expect — that we raise funds from people at all of the major labs,” said Carson, but he declined to specify further. The money will be raised through Public First, a 501(c)4 nonprofit that can influence elections through ads but is not required to disclose its donors.
Leading the Future has also established a 501(c)4 nonprofit, called Build American AI, described as its public-education arm, to promote its vision for the industry’s future.
An early adviser to the super PAC, speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose private information, said the nonprofit plans to counter a “doomer” movement inside the tech industry that the person said has spent years persuading regulators and the public that AI poses an existential threat to humanity.
Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, which studies the social impact of AI, said that none of the new political groups appear to be focused on issues already affecting voters, such as AI’s effects on labor markets or the potential health impacts of living near a data center.
“It’s hugely problematic if the scope for policy debate is narrowed [by] two very well-capitalized interest groups that are largely based out of Silicon Valley, for a technology that is already having profound effects on the world,” she said.
Michael Toscano, director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, said a broad swath of Americans have developed concerns about AI as chatbots like ChatGPT have become widely used.
He predicted “whiplash” for Trump’s MAGA coalition, because Republican voters who supported his attacks on the tech industry in his first term around claims like censoring conservative speech are concerned by his recent alliance with Silicon Valley over AI. “This is perhaps the thing that writes the epitaph of the MAGA movement,” Toscano said.
Naomi Nix contributed to this report.
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