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

It's tax season. And at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers. But here's a big one you need to hear, billions. That's the amount of money in refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number, 100,000,000. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com/podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. Hello, and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Belan, and we're doing something a little different here today instead of our usual Friday roundtable. This week, we've seen the Department of Defense putting pressure on anthropic to allow unrestricted use of its AI in the military. Meanwhile, across the country, people are rising up against AI data center build outs. I'm not sure about all of you, but my Twitter feed is full of industry people breaking down the conversation into doomers versus boomers. The people who think AI will save us all and the people who think it will kill us all. I think that most people are actually somewhere in the middle. There's a lot of us out there who see the awesome power of AI and wanna make sure that it's rolled out responsibly, that safety is taken into account rather than just moving fast and breaking things and enriching tech oligarchs. This is something that touches all of our lives. One of the people who is attempting to walk the middle road is Alex Borres. He's a New York assembly member who's running for New York's 12th Congressional District, and he's made headlines in recent months after incurring the wrath of Silicon Valley billionaires for his role in sponsoring New York's RAISE Act in AI safety bill. Okay. Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Really excited to see you again. When we last met, I believe that was in DC, and we were both at an AGI conference trying to learn a little bit more about how do we govern this? How do we deal with this. So, yeah, clearly, a lot has happened in the last few months. And talking about the politics of it and the way that lobbying is happening around it. And so, yeah, a a lot of developments there as well. Yeah. I think on that day, actually, was the day that Leading the Future, which is a Silicon Valley ProAI pack backed by Joe Lonsdale. It's backed by a 16 z, backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman. That's the day that they decided that they were gonna come after you. And I think they've spent what was it? Like, a hun no. Sorry. They've spent $1,000,000 on campaign ads against you. I think they've already spent, like, 1,300,000.0. They just did another 7 figure ad buy. They they have committed to spending at least $10,000,000 against me. …