NY-12: The Campaign to Take Down Alex Bores (D) Is Just the Beginning
NEW YORK CITY — Alex Bores had known for a while that a political operation called Leading the Future, funded by artificial-intelligence industry leaders, would be coming after him in his race to replace Democrat Jerry Nadler in New York’s 12th congressional district. He just wasn’t sure how.
The group had promised in November that they would target him, because Bores, a Democratic state assemblymember, had recently passed an AI safety bill in the New York legislature widely regarded as the furthest-reaching in the country.
When we spoke earlier this winter, before the group’s ads against him had come out, Bores was gaming out the likeliest attack scenarios. He thought that their strategy would have little to do with the policy issue that actually motivated it. He pointed to public polling showing broad public support for rules governing AI safety.
“I’m sure they won’t come after me on AI,” Bores, 35, told me, sitting in a midtown Manhattan bagel shop between campaign stops, “because they’re in the wrong.” He expected that they’d go after him on higher-profile issues, as similar tech-industry-aligned organizations had with candidates in the past.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/03/06/alex-bores-ai-leading-the-future-anthropic-00797055