How a Congressional Primary Became a Proxy Battle Over A.I.
When political candidates rehearse for campaign debates, they usually choose a surrogate to play the role of their rival. Rob Portman, who represented Ohio in the Senate for a dozen years, played Al Gore to George W. Bush and Barack Obama to John McCain and Mitt Romney. Alex Bores, a 35-year-old New York State Assemblyman and candidate in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District, opted to use a chatbot instead. This might seem like his generation’s path of least resistance. Bores, however, who has a well-trimmed beard and wears a navy blue suit for all occasions, comes across as the kind of very good boy who does more homework than is strictly necessary. Just after the new year, I joined him on a road trip to Albany for the opening of the legislative session. Bores prides himself on his functional competence, and after learning he wouldn’t be driving (his chief of staff, Anna Myers, wanted him to call her on the phone to thank donors), he accepted the passenger seat with some reluctance. To Myers’ slight exasperation, he prioritized a series of “birthday calls,” a regular practice he extends to family, friends and people he once met on the subway.
Bores grew up on the Upper East Side; his parents worked in network television, and in his first major media appearance, at age three, his mother read him “Everyone Poops” on ABC7 Eyewitness News. He traces his political involvement to third grade, when his father took him to a union picket, and he carried a sign reading “Disney is mean to my dad.” Before turning to public service, Bores worked in the software industry, including for the defense company Palantir, where he described his work on epidemic preparedness, VA hospital staffing, and other projects related to government efficiency. He now presents himself as the first elected Democrat in New York with a degree in computer science. (Two were elected on the same day.) As a young and hard-working member of the Assembly, he devoted much of his term to the emerging issue of AI regulation. It was a niche program at the time – that is, a year ago – but he was already a regular user of AI. In his Albany office, he told me he worked with researchers affiliated with Stanford to integrate the state’s entire legal code into a specially designed AI tool. He asked the system to find examples of outdated, absurd or discriminatory provisions – “zombie laws that were clogging up our system,” as he described them. He returned from an afternoon’s work with more than four thousand suggestions, including Section 10-B of the New York General Business Law, one section of which requires prompt delivery of international money orders delivered by steamboat, and Section 203-A of the Labor Law, which decrees that all elevators must be equipped with chairs. Less hilariously, Section 13-AA of New York’s Domestic Relations Law required any applicant for a marriage license who “is not of Caucasian, Indian, or Oriental race” to first submit to a sickle cell test.
It was only natural that his debate preparation would involve a chatbot, in particular Claude Cowork, an assistant “agent” developed by Anthropic, capable of carrying out multi-step instructions itself. The next panel, he explained to Claude, would feature the other two frontrunners in what is currently a nine-way contest: Micah Lasher, who is a 44-year-old New York State Assemblyman, a former aide to Michael Bloomberg’s mayor and a favorite of the Democratic establishment; and Jack Schlossberg, a social media influencer who, as the thirty-three-year-old grandson of President John F. Kennedy, is Democratic establishment royalty. Schlossberg is known for once asking X about who was “much hotter”, second lady Usha Vance or former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When asked to explain such a bizarre investigation, Schlossberg defended it as a provocative display of trolling: “The Internet is a nuance-destroying machine – there’s never room to qualify anything. You have to be very controversial to break through.” It’s unclear what it would have been like for Schlossberg to promote a nuanced discussion about his late grandmother’s relative sex appeal, but he has a talent for aura farming. In an early poll, Schlossberg led the Twelfth Congressional District with twenty-two percent.
