1. A High-Profile Manhattan Race Becomes an AI Industry Battleground
New York's 12th Congressional District — a deep-blue Manhattan seat being vacated by longstanding Rep. Jerry Nadler — has emerged as one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries of the 2026 cycle. The contest has attracted several prominent candidates, including Jack Schlossberg, a member of the Kennedy family, and George Conway. Among those competing is Alex Bores, a first-term New York State Assemblymember who has positioned himself as a voice for AI safety and accountability legislation at the state level.
Bores now finds himself at the center of a sustained independent expenditure campaign launched by Think Big PAC, a super PAC with significant backing from major technology and crypto industry donors. The group has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars targeting Bores, and its latest volley invokes a name that carries substantial political toxicity in any context: Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced former CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, who is currently serving a 25-year federal prison sentence following his conviction on fraud and conspiracy charges.
2. What the Mailer Says and What the Records Show
Think Big PAC distributed a sharply worded direct mail piece to voters in the district that made a specific factual claim: Alex Bores received more than $100,000 in support from the former head of FTX through Bankman-Fried's 2022 political network. The mailer described this as "Bankman-Fried's buddies bankrolling Bores for Congress" and called on voters to "do better than Bores."
CoinDesk confirmed the amounts referenced in the mailer through New York State elections filings, establishing that the spending attribution is grounded in documented campaign finance records rather than invented. The support involved independent expenditure activity from a Bankman-Fried-affiliated PAC on behalf of Bores' earlier state legislative campaign — not a direct contribution from Bankman-Fried personally, but money from a political network that has since become one of the most scrutinized in American campaign finance history.
The context matters: in the 2022 cycle, Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives were among the largest political donors in the United States, distributing tens of millions of dollars across federal and state candidates spanning both parties. A CoinDesk analysis found that 196 members of Congress — representing more than a third of the body — received some form of campaign support from Bankman-Fried or affiliated FTX executives during that period. The scale of that distribution is precisely why the PAC activity is not an unusual mark against Bores in an absolute sense, but he is notable as one of only two state-level candidates in New York — alongside Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado — who received support from the SBF-affiliated political network.
3. The Larger Context: Think Big PAC and the AI Industry's Political Playbook
Think Big PAC is the operational manifestation of a specific political strategy being deployed by the technology industry in the 2026 election cycle. The group says it backs candidates aligned with pro-technology policies and opposes those it characterizes as hostile to innovation — particularly in artificial intelligence. Its interest in Bores is directly connected to his legislative record: Bores has been one of the more active state-level proponents of AI safety and accountability legislation, introducing bills that would impose regulatory requirements on artificial intelligence systems in New York.
Think Big PAC is organizationally connected to, and shares operational leadership with, Leading the Future — a super PAC backed by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and other major technology investors. Leading the Future publicly announced as early as November 2025 that Bores would be its first targeted candidate in the 2026 cycle. The group has reportedly amassed approximately $70 million for its campaign activities.
The strategy mirrors the playbook that the crypto industry's own political apparatus — specifically Fairshake PAC — successfully deployed in the 2024 cycle. Fairshake's spending against candidates it identified as hostile to digital asset innovation helped reshape the congressional landscape in the industry's favor. Leading the Future and Think Big PAC are explicitly modeled on that approach, adapted for the AI policy context.
4. The Palantir Attack and the Pattern of Opposition
The SBF mailer is not the first line of attack Think Big PAC has deployed against Bores. The group previously ran television and digital advertising campaigns targeting his past employment at Palantir, the data analytics and intelligence software company. Those earlier ads drew a cease-and-desist letter from Bores' campaign alleging that the advertisements contained false and defamatory statements — a legal counterpunch that signals the campaign's intention to contest the framing rather than absorb the attacks passively.
The combination of the Palantir-focused ads and the SBF-focused mailer reflects a strategy of identifying multiple potential liabilities in Bores' background and testing which resonates most effectively with the target Democratic primary electorate. The PAC's willingness to run a campaign explicitly invoking SBF in a Democratic primary in Manhattan — a district where the FTX collapse and Bankman-Fried's political donations have been widely covered — suggests a calculated bet that the association carries sufficient political weight to move voters even when the connection is indirect.
Bores publicly identified the individuals he characterized as the Trump megadonors behind the attacks, posting on social media and providing voters in the district with his own framing of who is funding the campaign against him. His communications positioned the AI industry's political spending as an effort to install a congressional ally who would oppose regulation of artificial intelligence.
5. The Irony in the PAC's Attack
There is a dimension of this political dynamic that is worth examining: Think Big PAC, in invoking SBF as a political weapon against Bores, is deploying the legacy of a disgraced figure whose political giving was itself characterized by attempts to use financial influence to shape policy outcomes favorable to his industry. Bankman-Fried positioned himself publicly as a proponent of effective altruism and regulation, while privately using political donations to build relationships with lawmakers across the regulatory landscape.
Think Big PAC's use of the SBF association as a negative — in a campaign funded by tech billionaires and venture capital firms making large political investments to influence AI regulation — creates a structural irony that Bores' campaign has not been slow to point out. The candidate's public response framed the attack as AI industry donors trying to purchase a congressional seat aligned with their policy preferences, turning the donor-influence critique back on his opponents.
6. The NY-12 Primary as a National Bellwether
The race for New York's 12th Congressional District has taken on symbolic significance beyond the specifics of its candidates and their records. It has become a test case for whether the technology industry's political investment strategy — which the crypto sector pioneered in the 2024 cycle and which the AI sector is now deploying in 2026 — can successfully influence Democratic primaries in deep-blue urban districts.
The 2024 crypto PAC strategy was most effective in competitive districts where the PAC's spending could decisively shift outcomes in relatively low-turnout primaries. New York's 12th, as a high-attention race in a heavily Democratic district with a crowded primary field, presents different dynamics. The presence of high-profile candidates like Schlossberg and Conway means the race is unlikely to be determined by a single issue or a single PAC campaign. Whether the AI safety versus AI innovation framing ultimately influences the outcome will be closely watched by both sides.
7. The Broader AI Policy Stakes
The reason Think Big PAC and Leading the Future have invested so heavily in opposing Bores is substantive, not merely strategic. Bores has been among the more active state-level proponents of AI regulatory frameworks in a legislative environment where the technology industry has been working to limit the scope of AI oversight at both the state and federal levels.
The technology industry's position has been that a patchwork of state-level AI regulation — analogous to what the industry argued was happening with crypto before federal clarity emerged — would create compliance burdens and competitive disadvantages for U.S. AI companies relative to competitors in jurisdictions with lighter-touch regulatory environments. Bores' advocacy for state AI accountability legislation makes him precisely the kind of candidate that pro-AI-industry political groups would seek to prevent from reaching Congress, where he would have a platform to champion similar regulatory approaches at the federal level.
8. The SBF Attack's Strategic Logic
The choice to deploy the SBF association as a political attack in a Democratic primary reflects a specific assessment of what is most damaging in the target electorate. In a Manhattan Democratic primary, Bankman-Fried's name carries significant negative connotations — his downfall was extensively covered, his political donations across the spectrum are well-known, and the FTX collapse affected actual individuals who lost funds. Associating a candidate with SBF's political network is designed to raise questions about the candidate's judgment and the company they keep, even when the association is indirect.
Think Big PAC's spokesperson framed it explicitly: the issue in their telling is not that Bores did anything wrong in 2022 when he received the independent support, but that he has subsequently declined to acknowledge the connection. This framing shifts the attack from a question of Bores' judgment in 2022 — when SBF had not yet been exposed — to a question of his current transparency and honesty.
9. A Campaign Finance Landscape in Flux
The NY-12 Democratic primary is playing out against a backdrop of evolving campaign finance dynamics in which technology industry political action committees are testing whether the electoral strategies pioneered by crypto industry groups translate effectively to the AI policy context. The structural similarities are significant: both industries face the prospect of regulatory frameworks being developed by legislators who may be unsympathetic to their interests, and both have responded by investing in electoral campaigns designed to shape the composition of the legislative bodies that will make those decisions.
The outcome in races like NY-12 will help determine whether the AI industry's political investment strategy is as effective in Democratic primaries as the crypto industry's proved to be in 2024. The variables are different — the electorate, the candidate field, the specific policy issues at stake — but the fundamental approach is the same.
10. What the Race Signals for Technology Policy
Whether Bores survives the PAC opposition and wins the NY-12 primary will tell the broader story of whether AI safety advocates can maintain electoral viability in the face of well-funded technology industry opposition. If he prevails, it suggests that the pro-regulation position on AI has sufficient grassroots support in Democratic urban constituencies to withstand significant outside spending. If the PAC campaign succeeds in defeating him, it will encourage further replication of the strategy in other races where AI safety advocates are seeking office.
Either way, the race illustrates that the policy debate over artificial intelligence regulation has moved from think tanks and regulatory comment periods into the electoral arena — where the spending dynamics, electoral incentives, and political framing that shape all contested elections will now also shape the development of the most consequential technology of the current era.