Late last year, New York State Congressman Alex Boas was the target of a pro-AI super PAC campaign to prevent him from running for Congress. The group, Leading the Future, has raised more than $100 million in funding from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, AI search startup Perplexity, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.
Boaz’s reaction was simple. “Try it.” Now he has the muscle to back up that challenge.
Public First Action, a PAC that has received $20 million in donations from Anthropic, is spending $450,000 to back Boas in his race in New York’s 12th Congressional District, Bloomberg reported. Like its rival, the commission is pro-AI, but with a different vision centered on transparency, safety standards, and public oversight.
Meanwhile, the industry-backed PAC Leading the Future has already spent $1.1 million on ads attacking Boas, largely because he sponsored New York state’s RAISE law, which would require major AI developers to disclose safety protocols and report significant abuse of their systems.
