A retrospective FEC read shows OpenAI employees broke with their president to bankroll AI-safety candidate Alex Bores, whom a Brockman-backed super PAC spent $8 million to sink. Bores lost — to a man who had voted for the same bill.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president, wanted Alex Bores to lose. Bores, a New York assemblyman and former Palantir engineer, had written the RAISE Act — a state bill requiring frontier labs to publish and follow safety protocols — and that made him a target. A super PAC called Leading the Future, whose backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir's Joe Lonsdale, Perplexity, and Brockman, dropped $8 million to defeat him in the June 23 Democratic primary for Manhattan's 12th district, CNBC reported (external source, opens in a new tab).

Brockman's own employees spent to save him. Sixteen OpenAI staffers cut Bores $86,000 in direct checks, Mission Local found in a review of federal filings (external source, opens in a new tab), and two more routed $205,000 to Guardrails Alliance — a pro-Bores committee that, by CNBC's account, was built expressly to speak for OpenAI workers uneasy with how their bosses were spending. A technical staffer, Juan Felipe Ceron Uribe, put another $200,000 into Dream NYC, a second group in Bores' corner.

That is the split worth noting: at OpenAI the donor class fractured, while at Anthropic it held. Five of CEO Dario Amodei's employees together sent roughly $2.2 million to Public First Action, the Anthropic-funded PAC that, per CNBC, carried $11 million into the race for Bores. Amodei's staff backed the candidate their boss backed; Brockman's staff backed the candidate their boss was trying to bury.

The spending bought Brockman less than the price tag suggests. Bores lost — but to Micah Lasher, who had voted for that same state AI-safety bill in the Assembly and campaigned against leaving Big Tech to police itself, CNBC noted. More than $40 million in outside money moved through the seat, by Transformer's account (external source, opens in a new tab), and all of it swapped one regulation-friendly assemblyman for another.

What isn't settled: Public First keeps its donors hidden, and the employee-by-employee totals rest on a single outlet's read of the filings, not on either company. The real test is whether Lasher legislates the guardrails he campaigned near — or whether the money simply bought Silicon Valley a quieter incumbent.