Outside Groups Pour $12 Million Into Manhattan Race Featuring AI Executive

Summary

Roughly $12 million in outside spending has flooded a single Manhattan House primary, and the person at the center of it is Alex Bores, an artificial intelligence executive whose candidacy has apparently scrambled the usual alliances. Silicon Valley is not a monolith here: some AI companies and their allies are backing Bores, while others are spending aggressively to defeat him, turning what would otherwise be a crowded local primary into a proxy war over how the industry wants to position itself in Washington. The scale of the spending has lifted Bores's profile well beyond what his own campaign could manage, though whether a torrent of mailers and digital ads can actually move voters in a New York City district is an open question. What makes the race notable is less the candidate than the fissure it has exposed inside an industry that rarely fights itself this publicly. At $12 million for a House primary, this is the kind of number that buys Senate seats in smaller states.