By Benjamin Guggenheim

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• New York Assembly member and AI safety champion Alex Bores has lost the Democratic primary to the incumbent’s tapped successor. Bores says that it’s only the beginning of the populist movement behind AI safety.
• Bores was particularly threatening to the AI industry due to his ability to synthesize ideas from the worlds of tech and politics. Bores’s loss is Big Tech’s win, but, overall, the AI industry’s strategy backfired.
• A sharp tech sell-off earlier this week appeared to be a healthy market correction. Investors may have soured on Alphabet due to Google’s recent loss of star AI talent.

This is Benjamin Guggenheim. Welcome to WP Intelligence’s AI & Tech Brief, where we examine the transformative technology of artificial intelligence at the intersection of innovation, policy and power. Get in touch at Benjamin.Guggenheim@washpost.com or on Signal at ben_guggenheim.88.

The Lead Brief

New York Assembly member and AI safety champion Alex Bores has lost the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District to Assembly member Micah Lasher, outgoing Rep. Jerry Nadler’s handpicked successor.

There are takes upon takes about what the outcome of the race means for the AI industry’s influence over U.S. politics — after super PACs backed by pro-AI innovation and pro-AI safety camps spent unprecedented money on the race.

“The victor, Lasher, is in fact more radical on AI than Bores,” said Dean Ball, a former Trump AI adviser, on X. (Ball was recently tapped by OpenAI to lead a new strategic futures team focused on AI policy and governance.)

“[Leading the Future’s] ‘victory’ here is that a guy who supports a data-center moratorium won, and the guy who supports frontier transparency and auditing (which LTF now supports!) lost. Is that really a win?”

The amount spent by the AI industry on the primary totaled more than $27 million by the end of the day, according to news site Transformer’s AI campaign finance tracker. That included $13 million from the Anthropic-linked Jobs and Democracy PAC in support of Bores and $8 million from a super PAC in the Leading the Future network, which is funded by OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir executives.

“The example set here was not the one that AI oligarchs intended,” said Bores in a statement on his defeat. “They set out to make people afraid to stand up to them. Instead, they learned just how ready people are to push back.”

Lessons in AI Influence

Here are some factors to consider: Lasher was a co-sponsor of Bores’s bill, known as the RAISE Act, that was signed into law in New York last December. The RAISE Act set a major precedent for sweeping AI transparency and safety protocols, and several other states have since followed suit.

But Bores arguably posed a unique threat to the AI power brokers fighting off regulation in Washington, D.C.

Bores worked in tech before politics, notably at data intelligence company Palantir, and knows how to talk to founders, venture capitalists and engineers in the tech ecosystem. In drafting the RAISE Act, Bores demonstrated a rare ability to translate concepts from the frontier of tech for voters, formulate a novel regulatory agenda and build a diverse coalition behind it.

In that sense, Bores is a much more dangerous candidate to the AI industry than a generic Democratic candidate supporting already-developed AI safety proposals.

Lasher fending off Bores is a win for Big Tech.

“The greatest fear of AI companies is that people catch on to the fact that they are developing the most dangerous technology in human history, with no oversight or regulation,” said Connor Leahy, U.S. executive director of ControlAI, a nonprofit focused on preventing risks posed by AI “superintelligence.”

“Candidates who speak clearly about the dangers of unchecked AI, including superintelligence and the accompanying risk of human extinction, are exactly the candidates the corporations fear and the people want,” Leahy said.

(ControlAI has garnered support from more than 100 U.K. lawmakers, and has been increasingly active briefing members of Congress on concerns associated with AI technology that is smarter than humans. More on this soon.)

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Bores referred me to a written copy of the candidate’s concession speech. “While we came up short tonight, the example set here was very much not the one they intended,” he said. “Future victories will be built on the shoulders of our progress made in this campaign.”

New York Assemblymember Alex Bores campaigns for the Democratic nomination for Congress in New York.. (AP Photo/Anthony Izaguirre)

The race undoubtedly raised Bores’s profile: Bores was already climbing an uphill battle against Lasher, who’s worked as a political operative in New York for nearly three decades and secured the endorsements from Gov. Kathy Hochul and former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg.

But Bores’s stance on AI issues and attacks from LTF drew the spotlight of the national media and raised Bores’s national profile. In the end, the 35-year-old candidate clinched 35,822 votes, compared to Lasher’s 40,106, according to NBC.

“I do think that the broader anti-AI backlash is much heavier-handed [and] cares much less about preserving innovation at all than is true of the RAISE Act,” according to one person who works on AI policy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “This was basically a strategic blunder on multiple levels.”

Josh Vlasto, a spokesperson for LTF, declined to take a victory lap when asked for comment on the race.

“We are building a broad coalition at the federal and state levels, and will continue to support policymakers who will work together to pass a national regulatory framework with strong and smart guardrails,” Vlasto said.

AI politics is not crypto politics: LTF was modeled on the success of Fairshake, the crypto super PAC that spent massively to oust lawmakers such as former senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) from Congress. But AI is turning out to be a different animal.

Unlike crypto, voters have shown they care deeply about the environmental impacts of data centers, AI-driven job losses and guardrails for children using the technology.

And while there is no organized anti-crypto constituency, tech titans, such as Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, are increasingly entering the political fray to combat LTF’s influence. That trend will only accelerate once OpenAI and Anthropic launch their IPOs later in the year, and newly minted deca-millionaires from Silicon Valley take an interest in Washington.

“Newly wealthy AI people ask me about political spending all the time,” Ball said on X, adding, “It’s much easier to light money on fire in this field than it is to spend it wisely.”

The pro-innovation camp will need to reflect on its electoral strategy.

The tech sell-off

Global stocks have taken a tumble spurred by a heavy sell-off of chipmakers and AI-focused shares, Victoria Craw and Miriam Waldvogel report for The Post.

The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both saw steep losses on Tuesday, though the indexes appeared to rebound Wednesday. SanDisk and Micron, which specialize in memory and storage chips, were down more than 13 percent at market closing on Tuesday.

Asian tech markets also took a big hit. Samsung Electronics and chipmaker SK Hynix lost more than 12 percent of their value Tuesday, contributing to a 10 percent decline in South Korea’s Kospi index.

The action came after Alphabet had its biggest one-day decline in over a year on Monday, which analysts attributed to Google’s loss of two star AI talents to rivals OpenAI and Anthropic: Noam Shazeer, who was a researcher at Google DeepMind, and John Jumper, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and another key researcher at DeepMind.

The outlook: Financial analysts aren’t expressing alarm about company valuations, but they are noting that the big-name AI stocks appear crowded.

Investors’ expectations for tech earnings and capital expenditures are already so high that it’s more difficult to justify an upside. At the same time, investors are keen to see companies report AI enterprise adoption and recurring revenue from AI products.

“I don’t think they’re expensive, but they’re crowded,” Andrew Slimmon, a senior portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

“I’d argue it’s healthy. It’s good for the markets, because, ultimately, what you don’t want to see is so much kind of euphoria that it ends badly,” Slimmon said.

Of the memory and chip shares, Slimmon said the market is acting “rational” and anticipating “cyclical earnings.”

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