New York\u2019s congressional primaries on Tuesday were supposed to be the moment AI\u2019s top backers definitively proved they could bend US politics to their will. Instead, they left behind a muddy stalemate that only raises more questions about whether their spending can keep pace with an anti-AI backlash.<\/p>\n
The stage for the battle was set last year, when some of America\u2019s leading tech investors launched a new, $100 million super PAC<\/a> dedicated to electing candidates who were \u201caligned with the pro-AI agenda\u201d and defeating those who weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n Months later, this group \u2014 dubbed Leading the Future (LTF) \u2014 named its first target<\/a>: New York Assembly member Alex Bores.<\/p>\n Bores had been the chief sponsor of the Empire State\u2019s \u201cRAISE Act,<\/a>\u201d which required developers of frontier AI models to follow various safety protocols or face steep fines. LTF fiercely opposed that bill. Thus, when Bores launched a congressional run, the super PAC sought to teach him \u2014 and his fellow Democrats \u2014 a lesson: Purse sweeping AI regulations and your next campaign will drown in a flood of opposition spending.<\/p>\n At first glance, it may look like LTF just achieved that objective. Bores lost his bid<\/a> on Tuesday night to represent New York\u2019s 12th District. Headlines deemed the race a victory for \u201cBig Tech.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n But appearances can be deceiving. In truth, Silicon Valley\u2019s libertarians are losing the fight over AI regulation \u2014 and the NY-12 race only underscores this reality.<\/p>\n Bores lost. So did his enemies. <\/p>\n Contrary to LTF\u2019s hopes, Bores\u2019s loss is unlikely to dissuade Democrats from backing far-reaching regulations on AI, for at least four reasons:<\/p>\n First, the race\u2019s winner, Assembly member Micah Lasher, is about as hostile to LTF\u2019s vision as Bores was. Lasher co-sponsored the RAISE Act and campaigned on pausing data center<\/a> construction nationwide, launching antitrust investigations into the major AI labs, protecting artists from \u201cAI-driven copyright infringement,\u201d prioritizing organized labor\u2019s interests in debates over AI deployment, and myriad other regulatory constraints on the technology. In his victory speech, Lasher directly addressed the AI companies<\/a> who took an \u201cunusual interest\u201d in the race, saying he \u201cwon\u2019t be taking my cues from either of you when it comes to protecting our kids, our jobs and our families.\u201d<\/p>\n Silicon Valley\u2019s proponents of light-touch AI regulation are losing.<\/p>\n Simply put, if the tech industry wants to convince Democrats that backing strict AI regulations is politically self-defeating, they\u2019ll need better evidence than a race won by\u2026a Democrat who backs strict AI regulations.<\/p>\n Second, it\u2019s far from clear that Bores\u2019s candidacy was actually hurt by industry opposition. As my former Vox colleague Kelsey Piper notes<\/a> at The Argument,<\/a> when LTF announced it was targeting Bores, betting markets gave him only a 10 percent chance<\/a> of victory, placing him behind both Lasher and Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg. Bores ultimately came in a close second<\/a>, trailing Lasher by only 4 percentage points (or about 4,000 votes).<\/p>\n It\u2019s plausible that LTF unintentionally aided Bores\u2019s rise to contention by validating his bonafides as the bane of Big Tech. Certainly, that identity earned the assembly member abundant<\/a> media<\/a> coverage<\/a>. \u201cFor voters, tech billionaires spending millions to beat a state legislator wasn\u2019t a flex; it was a tell,\u201d Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist who advised the Bores campaign, told me.<\/p>\n Third \u2014 and related \u2014 the race ended up becoming a fight between AI companies, not just about them.<\/p>\n Bores\u2019s candidacy was not solely powered by a grassroots backlash to industry meddling. Rather, he was himself the recipient of massive Silicon Valley donations<\/a>, albeit from the segment of the tech industry that worries about AI safety. Anthropic, the maker of the cha6bot Claude, was an enthusiastic supporter of the RAISE Act. And when LTF came for that law\u2019s chief sponsor, the AI giant\u2019s super PAC<\/a> rallied to his support, supplying Bores with at least $11 million <\/a>in outside funding. The crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, meanwhile, tossed another $19 million<\/a> Bores\u2019s way.<\/p>\n Importantly, this flood of financing was a reaction to LTF\u2019s intervention. In other words, by targeting Bores, the super PAC arguably made it easier for him to raise money \u2014 and highlighted the existence of a pro-regulation, tech industry donor network. It is hard to see how this will make Democrats more afraid to meddle with AI.<\/p>\n Finally, Lasher\u2019s victory probably didn\u2019t have that much to do with artificial intelligence, one way or another. Lasher has been involved in New York politics for about a quarter century<\/a> longer than Bores has, and boasts personal ties to Michael Bloomberg, Kathy Hochul, and other power players in the state\u2019s Democratic Party. He was the race\u2019s favorite for more or less the entirety of the race. Therefore, even if Lasher favored light-touch AI regulation, his narrow victory over Bores wouldn\u2019t prove much. Given his actual positions on AI, his win does nothing to advance LTF\u2019s argument.<\/p>\n The push for AI regulation is coming from inside the (White) House<\/p>\n Meanwhile, since Leading the Future launched last year, the national political climate has turned sharply against them.<\/p>\n In a recent Fox News poll,<\/a> 80 percent of respondents said they favored regulating AI to protect public interests, even if doing so slows innovation. Other surveys<\/a> show a large majority of Americans opposing the construction of new data centers in their areas.<\/p>\n By itself, public opinion might not be an insuperable obstacle to Big Tech libertarians\u2019 agenda. Voters are increasingly skeptical of AI, but still don\u2019t typically consider it a top priority<\/a>.<\/p>\n Yet the national security state is also turning against laissez-faire in the AI sector. And its will is harder to ignore. Amid growing concerns about AI\u2019s capacity to aid cybercrime, the White House released an executive order<\/a> earlier this month encouraging labs to seek the government\u2019s approval before releasing new models. Weeks later, the Trump administration took the extraordinary step of essentially ordering<\/a> Anthropic to remove its Fable model from the market, on national security grounds. This represented a more radical and capricious government intrusion into the AI industry than Bores\u2019s signature law ever contemplated.<\/p>\n Leading the Future knows that the ground has shifted beneath its feet. When it first announced its targeting of Bores, it lambasted<\/a> the RAISE Act as a \u201cclear example of the patchwork, uninformed, and bureaucratic state laws that would slow American progress and open the door for China to win the global race for AI leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n Last month, however, the super PAC announced that it actually supported<\/a> the RAISE Act, as the law \u201cgets the combination of innovation and safety right.\u201d LTF reconciled these positions by insisting that, while Bores\u2019s initial draft of the legislation was ruinous, the final version was excellent.<\/p>\n This is unconvincing. It\u2019s true that the RAISE Act got watered down before enactment. But the idea that these changes were large enough to transform the bill from an act of catastrophic national sabotage \u2014 into a model of pro-innovation lawmaking \u2014 is implausible. And LTF\u2019s supposed support for the measure is belied by the months it spent vigorously lobbying <\/a>the federal government to preempt New York\u2019s law.<\/p>\n In reality, the group has simply retreated in the face of shifting political winds. Silicon Valley\u2019s proponents of light-touch AI regulation are losing. And Bores\u2019s loss did nothing to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York\u2019s congressional primaries on Tuesday were supposed to be the moment AI\u2019s top backers definitively proved they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[66,17626,26829,9,11,10,87,282],"class_list":["post-277672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-big-tech","tag-innovation","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-politics","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}