Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

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Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

April 21, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

Alex Bores is trying to win a congressional seat to represent part of New York City. Here’s why A.I. executives are funding the effort to stop him.

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The New York Times

Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?

Alex Bores is trying to win a congressional seat to represent part of New York City. Here’s why A.I. executives are funding the effort to stop him.

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode

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If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.

Archival clip of political attack ad:

He made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE, enabling ICE and powering their deportations while making bank. Now he’s running from his past. ICE is powered by Bores’s tech.

Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.

Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.

So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.

And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.

Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI — who, it should be said, has been horribly targeted in recent violent attacks by anti-A.I. individuals — was trying to cool down temperatures here. He wrote: “It is important that the democratic process remains more powerful than companies.”

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