What happened
Public First Action, a political action committee backed by a $20 million Anthropic donation, is spending $450,000 to support New York Assembly member Alex Bores’ congressional campaign. This counters $1.1 million in attack ads from Leading the Future, a rival PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Leading the Future targeted Bores over his sponsorship of New York’s RAISE Act, which mandates safety protocol disclosures and misuse reporting for major AI developers.
Why it matters
The AI industry is fracturing into competing political factions over state-level regulation. Following the launch of the $100 million Leading the Future PAC last week, frontier model developers are now directly funding opposing sides of specific legislative races. Unified industry lobbying is over. Policy teams and founders must navigate a landscape where financial support depends on specific regulatory stances: Anthropic backs mandatory safety disclosures and public oversight, while the Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI-backed coalition actively penalises lawmakers who introduce compliance burdens.
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