Alex Bores, the former Palantir engineer turned New York state Assemblymember, is trying to turn a costly political defeat into a new campaign for AI regulation.
He launched the nonprofit Who Decides on Tuesday with his former chief of staff, Anna Myers. The group has raised $10 million so far and aims to raise $20 million more in 2027, for a $30 million total ahead of 2028.
Bores has made regulation the center of his political identity. He co-authored the RAISE Act, New York’s frontier AI safety law, and ran this year for Rep. Jerry Nadler’s open congressional seat on that platform.
That race turned into a money war. Leading the Future, a super PAC funded in part by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, spent more than $7.6 million against him over the law. Public First Action, with $20 million from Anthropic, spent on Bores’ side. Total outside money in the race topped $40 million, the most expensive House primary of the cycle. Bores still lost.
Now he wants Who Decides to do something different from the giant-money fights that shaped that campaign. He said the nonprofit is not trying to outspend groups such as Leading the Future or Build American AI. Instead, it is targeting 11 battleground states through organizations already active there.
Bores said the goal is to unite AI advocacy groups Democrats already trust and help them build their own agendas instead of handing them one. He told Fortune he wants to 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. He said most voters have an answer key in their head for issues such as Medicare or the Green New Deal, but with AI, even the messaging is still unsettled. '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.'
Bores also pointed to polling he says shows broad support for tougher AI rules. He said '80% of Americans want there to be more regulation on AI, and that’s across parties.' Independent polling this year was somewhat lower, but still pointed 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, independents and Republicans.
The broader debate has also drawn mixed signals from the industry itself. In May 2023, OpenAI’s Sam Altman asked to be regulated when he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. By May 2025, he reversed course, telling the Senate Commerce Committee that requiring government approval would be 'disastrous.' Anthropic’s Dario Amodei kept the pro-regulation position throughout.
For Bores, the market has not settled the question, but the money has already shaped the terrain. The fight over AI policy is no longer just about technology; it is about whether a small set of donors and firms will keep defining the rules, or whether voters get a real say before the administrative state locks in the next regime.
