Corporatocracy: The Most Expensive House Seat in America Decides Tonight

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Corporatocracy hard at work.

There is a congressional primary happening today that most of the country has never heard of, for a House seat that decides nothing about national policy on its own, in a district so reliably Democratic that the general election is a formality. And the artificial intelligence industry has spent more money trying to control the outcome of that single primary than most United States Senate campaigns raise in an entire six-year cycle.

As of this week, at least six super PACs tied to the AI industry have poured a combined total approaching $30 million into New York's 12th Congressional District — the seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. Voting closes tonight. The reason this matters far beyond Manhattan is the reason almost no one outside the trade press is covering it that way: this is not a fight over who represents the Upper East Side. It is the AI industry's live rehearsal of whether it can simply outspend democracy at the district level to decide who gets to regulate it — and a counter-rehearsal, funded by a rival faction of the same industry, of whether enough money on the other side can stop that from working.

Thirty Million Dollars, One Zip Code

Strip away the candidate names for a moment and just look at the money, because the money is the story.

On one side: Leading the Future, a super PAC network backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, has spent more than $7.6 million specifically opposing one candidate. Leading the Future was explicitly modeled on Fairshake, the cryptocurrency industry's own super PAC network, which spent tens of millions in 2024 rewarding and punishing candidates purely on the basis of their crypto-regulation votes. The architecture is identical. Only the industry changed.

On the other side: the Public First network — funded in part by Anthropic and its allies — has spent roughly $12 million defending that same candidate. A subsidiary effort, the Jobs and Democracy PAC, has spent close to $6 million more. Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen personally committed $3.5 million through a PAC called You Can Push Back. A group called DREAM NYC, whose only disclosed donor is a single Anthropic employee who gave $50,000, ran ads framing the race as a fight against billionaire tech allies of the current administration. Add Bloomberg's separate $5 million backing a different candidate, plus a $250,000 counter-buy from Guardrails Alliance — funded not by tech money but by the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Working Families Party — and you have nearly thirty million dollars spent on one House primary before a single general-election vote is cast.

The Candidate the Industry Decided to Make an Example Of

The man at the center of all this spending is Alex Bores, a 35-year-old New York State Assembly member who spent five years at Palantir as a data scientist, project lead, and eventually the company's U.S. government lead. He left in 2019, citing his discomfort with the company's renewed contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a contract records indicate he never personally worked on.

Bores went on to co-sponsor the RAISE Act, which Politico described as the furthest-reaching AI safety legislation passed by any state legislature in the country. It passed both chambers of the New York legislature in June 2025. Governor Kathy Hochul weakened the bill before signing it into law that December. Bores has said publicly that AI regulation is not what will determine whether the United States wins or loses its competition with China — but that voters are already living with AI's downsides and will reward candidates who try to manage them.

That record is the entire reason this primary became a national proxy war. An AI researcher told Gothamist that defeating Bores would let the industry use him as an example for other candidates nationwide — regardless of whether his single House vote would have moved federal AI policy on its own. The point of the spending was never really about this one seat. It was about proving, to every other state legislator watching, what happens to you if you write a bill the industry doesn't like.

Who's Actually on Each Side of This — Because Neither Side Is Grassroots

It would be convenient to frame this as good corporate money versus bad corporate money, industry villains versus a grassroots reformer. That framing doesn't survive contact with the FEC filings. Both camps are billionaire-funded. Both camps are AI-industry money. The disagreement isn't between corporations and the public — it's between two factions of the same industry with different bets on how regulation affects their bottom line, each trying to buy the outcome that favors their position. Brad Carson, who chairs the pro-regulation Public First network, told NOTUS that even a narrow loss for Bores would prove there's real political support behind AI regulation — which is a tell in itself. When the chair of a multimillion-dollar PAC is already spinning a loss as a moral victory before the polls close, the actual outcome was never the point. The point was building a usable data set for the next race.

The Voters Caught in the Crossfire

New York's 12th district is one of the wealthiest, oldest, and most densely populated in the country — Central Park, Midtown, the Theater District, the Upper East and West Sides. It is reliably Democratic but not uniformly progressive; voters here backed Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani in last year's mayoral race. As of polling taken in the campaign's final stretch, roughly a third of likely voters remained undecided, even after months of saturation advertising from both camps. One Morningside Heights resident described the experience to Gothamist as being bombarded by ads from both directions until the specifics blurred together — for and against the same man, depending on which mailer arrived that day.

National polling gives some sense of why this fight is happening in the first place. A Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. A separate Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll found that a slim majority of the public doesn't trust either political party to handle AI policy well. That distrust is exactly the vacuum the industry's money is racing to fill before voters figure out what they actually want.

This Is the Crypto Playbook, Running a Second Time

None of this is improvised. Leading the Future's own leadership has confirmed the strategy is a direct copy of Fairshake, the crypto industry's 2024 model for punishing unfriendly candidates and rewarding friendly ones with overwhelming, race-specific spending. Fairshake worked. It reshaped how candidates across the country talk about cryptocurrency regulation almost overnight, simply by demonstrating that crossing the industry was financially fatal in a primary. AI's version of that machine is now being field-tested in Manhattan, with both factions of the industry funding opposite sides to see which approach — buy the deregulation outcome, or buy the regulation outcome — produces a more controllable Congress.

The Bigger Picture: Corporatocracy With the Mask Off

This site has spent multiple dispatches naming the same mechanism under different headlines. GEO Group privately lobbied ICE to rewrite its own detention standards, and got every change it asked for, from an agency run by a former GEO Group executive. NextEra's $67 billion acquisition of Dominion consolidated the grid your electric bill depends on into fewer hands while regulators waved it through. Even the Federal Trade Commission's own February settlement with pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts — forcing transparency reforms after years of industry-favorable opacity — only happened after the practices had already cost patients billions.

NY-12 is the same mechanism, just compressed into six weeks and one zip code instead of stretched across years of quiet agency memos nobody reads. What makes this version almost more honest is that it isn't hidden behind procurement language or technical rule dockets. Nobody is pretending this is grassroots. The PACs disclose their names — Leading the Future, Public First, Jobs and Democracy, You Can Push Back, DREAM NYC, Guardrails Alliance — and their funders are a matter of public record. The corporatocracy isn't sneaking in through the back door here. It's running full-page ads on opposite sides of the same neighborhood newspaper and calling it civic engagement.

Call to Action: What Needs to Happen Now

1. Demand your member of Congress co-sponsor legislation requiring real-time, plain-language disclosure of super PAC funding sources within 48 hours of any expenditure over $100,000 in a single House race — not the current system, where filings can lag for months.
2. Demand the Federal Election Commission, which has struggled to maintain quorum on contested enforcement matters, be fully reconstituted so disputes over coordinated super PAC spending can actually be ruled on instead of stalling indefinitely.
3. Push your state legislature to examine New York's RAISE Act as a model — and ask publicly, on the record, who lobbied Governor Hochul to weaken it before she signed it.
4. Pull the FEC filings yourself. Every PAC named in this race is public record. Look up who funded the side you instinctively agree with, too — corporatocracy isn't a one-party, one-industry problem, and assuming your preferred side is the clean one is exactly how the mechanism keeps running unchallenged.
5. Watch what happens to Bores regardless of tonight's outcome. If he wins, watch whether deregulation money escalates further in the next race to send a louder message. If he loses, watch how fast other state legislators currently drafting AI safety bills quietly shelve them.

Whoever wins NY-12 tonight, the industry already got its answer to the only question it was really asking: does the money work? If it does, this stops being a strange one-time story about a Manhattan primary. It becomes the template every industry facing regulation reaches for next.

V64OTD // THEY DIDN'T LOBBY THE LAW. THEY BOUGHT THE SEAT THAT WRITES IT.