Silicon Valley is spending more than $100mn to elect politicians who will leave AI alone. A new group of tech workers wants to fight back with a fraction of that.
The Guardrails Alliance, a super PAC that supports AI regulation, launched on Thursday with money from tech employees, labour unions and parents. Democratic operatives Shaunna Thomas and Leah Hunt-Hendrix are behind it. It has about $5mn at its disposal now and hopes to raise $15mn this cycle, according to the New York Times.
A $5M knife to a $100M gunfight
The asymmetry is the point.
Guardrails’ main adversary, a pro-AI super PAC called Leading the Future, has more than $100mn from the likes of OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. It backs candidates who favour light-touch AI rules, part of a wider push in Washington to stop states from regulating the technology.
“This is not about matching them dollar for dollar,” Thomas told the NYT. Instead, she said, the group wants to be a “political home” for people who fear the anti-regulation AI sector is trying to buy elections.
The fight for one New York seat
The first battle is a single congressional primary. Guardrails has put $250,000 behind Alex Bores, a former engineer and New York lawmaker who wrote the state’s RAISE Act, which requires big AI developers to disclose their safety protocols. Leading the Future has spent more than $7mn trying to defeat him.
Bores’ own ad leans on the human cost. It features the parents of Adam Raine, a teenager who, his family says, died by suicide after months of conversations with ChatGPT, part of a growing wave of lawsuits over AI’s harms to children.
Not a clean fight between money and grassroots
It would be neat to cast this as people versus money. The reality is messier. Bores is also backed by Public First Action, funded by a $20mn donation from Anthropic, which has itself called for binding AI rules, and by a separate committee that took $3.5mn from a crypto billionaire. The pro-safety side has deep pockets too.
What is new is the labour angle. Tech workers have spent the year organising, against ICE contracts and the Pentagon’s treatment of Anthropic, and Guardrails is trying to turn that discontent into votes.
The test, next week in New York, is whether $5mn and a grievance can outrun $100mn and a billboard.
