In early November, in that exceedingly brief window between the midterm election and presidential-primary season, some of the biggest names in the Democratic Party are expected to gather at the Four Seasons in San Francisco for a closed-door conference on artificial intelligence. There, a number of presidential hopefuls will sit for a series of talks and dinners with leaders of the country’s largest labor unions, donors to the biggest Democratic super-PACs, and political strategists who work with the party’s top elected officials.

The host of the conference is not a former president or party leader or name-brand interest group; it is Alex Bores, a two-term state lawmaker from the Upper East Side who lost the Democratic primary in June to succeed Jerry Nadler in Congress. Last year, Bores was mostly unknown in national politics. After sponsoring New York’s RAISE Act in the State Assembly — which, as of January 1, will require AI companies to publish safety protocols and report incidents of potential catastrophic risk in their models — he campaigned on bringing similar regulation to the federal level. This prompted Leading the Future, a super-PAC that has received millions from an OpenAI executive, to spend roughly $8 million on an effort to defeat him.

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The donation cast Bores as a martyr to the political power of tech companies. There were profiles in Politico, Time, and Vanity Fair and a 90-minute sit-down on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Bores received a surge of campaign contributions as a rival set of AI companies and tech-world figures who support regulation poured $18 million into the race to counter LTF.

He ended up losing the primary to Micah Lasher, but in the process, Bores became perhaps the most preeminent voice for AI safety. It may seem like an odd fit: a politician with fame as an AI fighter who has major funders with ties to the industry. But the combination has helped Bores establish his next move. He is now launching an audacious campaign to push the field of 2028 Democratic presidential candidates to take on a new breed of corporate oligarch and write the rules for the most pivotal technology of the 21st century. “What’s the David Foster Wallace essay about how a fish doesn’t know what water is? We are going to be shaping the environment that these candidates are running in,” Bores says. “We can’t match Leading the Future tit-for-tat in spending, but that’s all they have to offer. We will have public opinion and public support, and we will be shaping the terms of the debate.”

Bores’s we is Who Decides, an advocacy organization he started just months after losing his race, when he and his supporters were having conversations about how to maintain the momentum from his congressional campaign. (Who Decides raised $10 million at launch and has planned commitments of another $20 million.) Part of the work will be traditional advocacy. Bores has already met with many would-be 2028 contenders — among them Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg — or their advisers. But he also has a bigger idea in mind.

Who Decides is hiring dozens of staffers and placing them in the six early-primary states and the seven key swing states to meet with “grasstops” leaders — prominent local pastors, Democratic Party county chairs, heads of Indivisible groups. By organizing among powerful on-the-ground constituencies, Bores thinks Democratic candidates in 2028 will have to go on the record with their positions on AI policies to gain support from the party’s base. “I want to make AI safety not like Medicare for All or ‘Abolish ICE,’ where half the people running are for it and half the people running are against it,” he tells me when we meet in early October. “I want to make it like marriage equality or being pro-choice, where if you’re a Democrat, of course you believe in AI safety.”

Bores explains this while ordering a drink at an Irish bar on Murray Street. He’d just come in from a nine-plus-hour City Council hearing across the street that was headlined by Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic employee who announced on social media that the technology his company was building could destroy civilization. After the meeting, a number of activists, operatives, and politicians had gathered to drink beer and talk about a “national Democratic AI agenda for 2028.” The event, sponsored by Guardrails Action — another group working to push AI safety — was one of a series Bores has attended over the past few months.

As the Democratic presidential-primary race gets underway, party strategists increasingly view AI as the central tension of the contest, partly because AI touches on every other issue — wealth inequality, the economy, the environment, education. Concerns about data centers alone have morphed from a local land-use issue into a stand-in for the runaway power of tech companies and the possibility of an economy that makes most........

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