If you’ve seen the recent ads attacking New York City Councilman Alex Boaz, you know that he worked for Palantir, an AI company that is behind the controversial raids and mass deportation efforts of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The ad even accuses Boaz of making hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop technology for ICE to “power deportations.”
But that’s not all. “I left Palantir specifically in 2019 because of my work with ICE,” Bores told TechCrunch on last week’s episode of Equity.
He is currently running for New York’s 12th Congressional District, and billionaires from big tech companies are funding outside groups targeting his campaign.
The ad is being funded by a super PAC called Leading the Future, which ironically is backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI search startup Perplexity, and other Silicon Valley heavyweights. The PAC has raised $125 million to track candidates in state elections introducing AI legislation and support candidates from a lighter approach to regulating AI.
“They have pledged to spend at least $10 million on me … because they know that I am the biggest threat to their quest for unlimited control over America’s workers, the hearts of our children, our climate, and our utility bills,” Boas said. “They are targeting me to make an example of me.”
He said his background working in the technology industry, including at Palantir and several startups, is exactly why Leading the Future targeted him in the first place.
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“The fact is that I have such a deep understanding of this technology that I can’t just dismiss it as, ‘This person doesn’t understand it,'” Boas said, adding that if elected, he would be only the second Democratic senator to hold a degree in computer science.
Boas drew the ire of Silicon Valley for sponsoring the RAISE Act, an AI transparency bill signed into law in December. The law requires large AI laboratories, especially those with revenues of more than $500 million, to develop and adhere to publicly available safety plans and to report any catastrophic safety incidents.
This is the kind of light-touch law that other industries die for, emphasizing disclosure and planning over active surveillance.
Boas said he doesn’t think Leading the Future wants to regulate AI unless it’s at the federal level, as the PAC has stated. Over the past year, states have been battling industry to protect their right to regulate AI in the absence of federal standards. In December, President Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to challenge “onerous” state AI laws like Boas’s RAISE Act.
Boas pointed to his campaign’s proposed national AI governance blueprint, which spans eight issue areas and 43 policy recommendations, and added that anyone serious about federal AI regulation should support him. He also introduced legislation that would require companies to disclose what’s in their training data and embed metadata standards to make it easier to track synthetic content.
Leading the Future is not the only Silicon Valley-backed PAC participating in the midterm elections. Meta has put $65 million into two super PACs, the American Technology Excellence Project and (Meta) Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across California, to elect state-level candidates friendly to the AI and tech industries. And AI companies, industry groups, and executives contributed at least $83 million to federal campaigns and committees in 2025.
“This is not a ‘we want to be part of the conversation,'” Boaz said. “This is saying, ‘We want to intimidate elected officials and intimidate anyone who disagrees with us.'”
“The average assembly race in New York probably raises a total of $100,000, maybe less,” Boas continued. “I think it’s hard for people to understand how beyond the norm that one company (Meta) is spending $65 million on a state campaign, let alone everything we do in Congress.”
Mr. Boas has the support of another Anthropology-backed PAC called Public First Action, which has spent $450,000 on The New Yorker. Public First Action describes itself as pro-AI, but with a focus on transparency, safety, and public oversight.
Leading the Future represents a “very small minority of voices” who see any regulation as a threat to the progress of AI and simply “want it broken,” he said. Boas’ supporters include tech workers at companies who are trying to block his campaign, part of a broader pattern of grassroots organizing within tech companies over how they deploy AI and who it serves.
At the other end of the spectrum, Boas said, there are a small group of people who “want to pretend AI never existed and put the genie back in the bottle and burn down all the data centers.”
He believes most Americans are somewhere in between. They are using AI and seeing its potential, but they are concerned about how fast it will happen.
“(They) are questioning whether government is living up to its mission of ensuring a future that benefits the many, not the few,” Boas said.
