Former Palantir engineer-turned New York state Assemblymember Alex Bores knows Americans want AI regulation. He co-authored the RAISE Act, New York’s frontier AI safety law. He ran this year for Rep. Jerry Nadler’s open congressional seat on that platform, even as many of his donors came from within the AI industry. But that didn’t stop Leading the Future, a super PAC funded in part by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, from spending more than $7.6 million against him over that law. Public First Action, with $20 million from Anthropic, spent on the race in Bores’ corner. Total outside money in the race topped $40 million, the most expensive House primary of the cycle. Bores still lost.
That loss helped lead to Who Decides, the nonprofit Bores launched on Tuesday with his former chief of staff, Anna Myers. So far, it has raised $10 million and aims to raise $20 million more in 2027, for a $30 million total ahead of 2028. Bores intends the nonprofit to unite the AI advocacy organizations Democrats already trust, help them build out their own agendas rather than hand them one, and establish “a shared floor of an agenda on things that we all want to see good done.”
“Give the American people a say in how AI develops,” Bores told Fortune. “Most voters have an answer key in their head for every question that they ask” on issues like Medicare or the Green New Deal. But with AI, Bores said, even the messaging lives in this gray area. “We’re in this limited time where it’s not even just the answers that are up for grabs, but even the questions that are being asked are up for grabs.”
The RAISE Act, which New York Gov. Kathy Hochul passed into law late last year following a tenuous time in Albany, necessitated a coalition of 55 organizations, filled with different stakeholders from AI policy to chatbots in school. That wasn’t the case for those against the act. “The opposition was always the same. It was a small subset of Silicon Valley that thinks there should be no regulation on AI whatsoever.”
That’s part of what drove Bores to create Who Decides. The group isn’t trying to outspend Leading the Future or Build American AI—Bores said he wishes he had the resources. Instead, it’s targeting 11 battleground states through organizations already active there. Outreach accelerated after Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic last week. “The seven major presidential candidates since my election, the 16 Congress members since last week,” Bores said of Coxon’s resignation. So far everyone who’s reached out has been a Democrat, though Bores said he’s open ears for anyone, regardless of political ideology.
Weak laws and weaker willpower
A recent Gallup poll found the majority of Americans, 56% to 58%, want stricter gun laws, while measures like background checks has close to 90% support in both parties, per Pew. And despite this finding, which has coexisted for decades, Congress rarely acts, something usually blamed on lobbying outspending a diffuse majority. AI seems to follow the same trajectory.
“The basics of this issue, while the urgency has changed a lot in the past week, the basics have not, which is that 80% of Americans want there to be more regulation on AI, and that’s across parties,” he said. Independent polling this year puts the figure somewhat lower but still in the same direction: a February–March 2026 Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found 65% of Americans say the government has done “too little” to regulate AI, including majorities of Democrats (77%), independents (72%), and Republicans (53%).
Public sentiment gets grayer when you look at one of the most prominent faces within the AI industry. In May 2023, OpenAI’s Sam Altman asked to be regulated when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But by May 2025, he reversed course, telling the Senate Commerce Committee that requiring government approval would be “disastrous.” Anthropic’s Dario Amodei held the pro-regulation position throughout, even as Anthropic-linked money flowed into the same political fights.
Regardless of what stances people have at first and ultimately land on, Bores said while industry figures keep landing on the same conclusion, a narrower set of financiers spend to stop it. “So many of the mega donors who are pushing for there to be no regulation whatsoever are Republican mega donors,” he said, naming Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk.
One can argue that’s what happened to his RAISE Act—what passed was a watered version that didn’t survive that same money intact: third-party audits and whistleblower protections were stripped before it passed. But still, that hasn’t changed Bores’ view of it: “The RAISE Act was, arguably still is, the strongest AI safety bill in the country,” he said, though he expects Illinois and Massachusetts to surpass it soon.
Avoid the circular firing squad
In 2025, Sen. Ted Cruz inserted language into the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that would have barred every state from enforcing any AI law for 10 years. Seventeen Republican governors asked for it to be stripped, before the Senate voted 99–1 to remove it.
Cruz is now co-sponsoring a new federal AI safety bill with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Majority Leader John Thune, built around safety testing and incident reporting. It may be D.C.’s most likely AI bill to pass yet, but if you read between the lines, it’s essentially Cruz’s old bill wrapped in federal packaging (and it comes with the very real possibility of removing all state AI bills with it). “Spot on,” he told Fortune about that reading. “It’s people trying to use this momentum and this crisis to shut down the real power people have to regulate.”
Despite the external politics playing on Capitol Hill, Bores also acknowledged the Democratic party has a less than stellar track record on getting messaging right. Often it’s because advocates who agree keep splitting the difference into separate fights. “Democrats are very passionate about making a difference, and that passion is usually well placed,” he said, “but that occasionally gets misdirected into turning into a circular firing squad and saying, no, my sub-issue is more important than your sub-issue.”
His case? “The people who are opposing almost every issue in AI are the same people… we should be sitting at the same table.”
