Silicon Valley Is Spending Millions to Stop One of Its Own | WIRED
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Would you vote a former Palantir employee into Congress? Maybe your first instinct is no. But what if you knew that a super PAC, funded by some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful people, including Palantir’s own cofounder, was in heated agreement with you?
I’m talking about New York Assembly member Alex Bores, a Democrat running for Congress in a crowded primary that also includes Kennedy scion and chronically online influencer Jack Schlossberg, TV commentator George Conway, and New York assemblyman Micah Lasher.
Bores, 35, has a master’s degree in computer science and worked in Big Tech—at Palantir, specifically—before turning to politics and winning a 2022 New York state assembly race. But while Bores’ background is in tech, that doesn’t mean he supports how the industry is doing its job. Bores is a vocal proponent of rigorous AI regulation and cosponsored New York’s RAISE Act, which became law in 2025 and requires major AI firms to implement and publish safety protocols for their models, among other guardrails.
Bores’ AI stance has made him a target for some of Big Tech’s leaders: In late 2025, a super PAC called Leading the Future—bankrolled by OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others—launched an aggressive campaign to thwart Bores’ primary run. In particular, the group takes issue with Bores’ regulatory approach to the AI industry, which they described as “ideological and politically motivated legislation that would handcuff not only New York’s, but the entire country’s, ability to lead on AI jobs and innovation,” in a previous statement to WIRED.
I sat down with Bores in early April, about 10 weeks before what’s presumably a decisive primary (New York’s 12th District consistently votes blue). We talked about that Palantir gig, why so few lawmakers seem to understand the tech they’re supposed to regulate, and how it feels to be on the receiving end of PAC-funded attack leaflets and text messages … about yourself.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Alex.
ALEX BORES: Thanks for having me.
I want to start with your tech background. It was fascinating to me that you worked at Palantir. At WIRED we’ve covered Palantir a lot, and one of our reporters had a very smart idea a few months ago to write a story about what the company actually does. Because a lot of people don’t really know or understand. The best part of that story, for me, was that some former employees of Palantir actually could not explain what it is or does. So I have to ask you, as a former employee of Palantir, what is your best explanation as to what Palantir actually does?
Palantir helps organizations make use of data they already have access to, by making it easier to track changes to that data over time, by making it quicker to integrate that data, and by putting what's called an ontology, an opinion of how the data should be structured, on top of the data itself.
So the best explanation of the ontology is actually from a project that I did at Palantir with the Department of Justice, where we were looking at the role of big banks in the Great Recession. We wanted to see if banks knew that the loans they were putting into their securities were not up to snuff. That they were below the standards.
An easy way to prove that would be if you saw a pattern of a loan being added to a security then being pulled out before it was issued and then put into another one that had the same standards. That would show, OK, there was some knowledge by the bank that there was a problem with that particular loan.
The problem is that e-discovery software was made to just help lawyers read documents. So theoretically all the data is there. You have Excel sheets with each individual loan tape, but it’s being presented to lawyers as “just read it,” and you can’t, as a human being, read thousands of loans and track it, tape to tape.
Sure. Of course.
We realized that the important piece of information was the loan itself, that was an object that should be tracked. That's what an ontology is helping you do. So we built a system that let you track individual loans, search for loans, moving from tape to tape, and found numerous examples of that exact pattern: Banks realizing there was a flaw, pulling it out of a security, and then sneaking it into another one later. Because we found so many of those patterns, we were able to recover $20 billion for taxpayers from settlements with the banks.
What was exciting to you about the idea of working at Palantir to begin with?
I have a master's in computer science, but that actually came after starting this work, so my undergrad was in industrial and labor relations.
I grew up on the picket line with my dad. I studied labor unions in undergrad, I led a campaign against Nike for laying off 1,8