Who's really running AI? Inside the billion-dollar battle over regulation, with Alex Bores

What It Covers

New York Assembly Member Alex Bores discusses his sponsorship of the RAISE Act, an AI safety law, and the resulting $10 million campaign against him by Leading the Future, a Silicon Valley super PAC backed by a16z, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, and Joe Lonsdale, revealing the financial scale of industry opposition to state-level AI regulation.

Key Questions Answered

• •Regulatory landscape split: Public opinion on AI breaks into three distinct camps: roughly 10% want AI eliminated entirely, 10% (represented by Leading the Future) want zero regulation, and 80% want measured oversight ensuring broad societal benefit. Politicians targeting that 80% majority face disproportionate financial opposition from the minority "let it rip" faction funding super PACs.
• •RAISE Act scope: The law applies only to AI companies with over $500 million in revenue that have built sufficiently large frontier models — currently just Google, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic. Requirements include publishing and adhering to a safety plan and reporting catastrophic safety incidents that cause or could imminently cause injury or death.
• •Money asymmetry in AI politics: Leading the Future has raised $125 million and pledged at least $10 million specifically against Bores, while the pro-regulation Public First Action PAC (backed by $20 million from Anthropic) has spent under $500,000 supporting him — a 20-to-1 spending ratio that signals deliberate intimidation of state legislators.
• •Deepfake policy solution: Bores argues deepfakes are a solvable problem through mandatory adoption of C2PA, a free, open-source metadata standard already created by industry. New York legislation requiring content provenance via C2PA is near passage, with the governor including a version in her budget — a replicable model other states can adopt immediately.
• •AI training data transparency: Bores is advancing a bill requiring AI models to disclose basic training data information, including whether copyrighted material or personally identifiable information was used. A similar California bill passed the state assembly unanimously before stalling in the senate, suggesting broad bipartisan support exists for this specific, narrow disclosure requirement.