'Give the American people a say in how AI develops': OpenAI's least favorite New York politico sees an opening
Fortune Catherina Gioino
Alex Bores lost a huge AI-regulation race, then launched a group to build the pro-rules side. He says voters want a say, while Silicon Valley money keeps trying to write the script.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Catherina Gioino — read the original for the full story.
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Alex Bores spent his run for Jerry Nadler’s open House seat selling the case for stricter AI rules. He had co-written New York’s RAISE Act, and the fight around it got very expensive very fast: a super PAC backed in part by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz spent more than $7.6 million against him, while Anthropic-funded Public First Action spent $20 million in his corner. Outside money in the primary topped $40 million, the cycle’s priciest House race. Bores lost anyway.
Now he is trying a different route. On Tuesday, he launched Who Decides with his former chief of staff, Anna Myers. The nonprofit has already raised $10 million, wants another $20 million in 2027, and is aiming for a $30 million war chest by 2028. Bores says the point is not to build a single new advocacy shop, but to knit together the AI groups Democrats already trust and help them set their own agenda instead of being handed one.
That pitch rests on a simple claim: most Americans already want more control over AI, even if the politics around it are still blurry. Bores argues that AI is in the same broad category as other issues where public opinion is clear and Congress still drags its feet. He says the fight is less about persuading people than about deciding which questions get asked in the first place.
His own state-level fight shows how hard that gets. The RAISE Act passed in New York after a tense stretch in Albany, but only after a coalition of 55 organizations came together. The version that made it through was weaker than the one he wanted; third-party audits and whistleblower protections were stripped out. Still, Bores calls it the strongest AI safety bill in the country, and expects Illinois and Massachusetts to go further.
Who Decides is aiming at 11 battleground states, working through groups already active there rather than trying to outgun the industry’s biggest spenders. And Bores thinks there is more momentum now, especially after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon resigned last week and people started reaching out. So far, he says, those calls have all come from Democrats. That, too, says something about who thinks this fight is worth having.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right instinct: stop waiting for tech firms to hand over a sensible policy and build a political machine that can survive their money. The funny part is that AI keeps getting sold as the future, yet the battle still looks like every other ugly Washington fight over who gets to set the rules. The only surprise is that it took this long for someone to treat it that way.
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