How a New York Primary Wound Up at the Center of the AI Storm

Alex Bores is engulfed in a brutal (and super-expensive) battle over how technology will change work, life, and society.

Alex Bores, democratic candidate in New York’s 12th Congressional District, speaks during the NY-12 for Congress: Candidate Forum at 92NY, April 15, 2026, in New York.

(Yuki Iwamura / AP)

New York City’s 12th Congressional District, in its many forms over the past century or so, has a rich history of influencing the national discourse. This was the Manhattan district that sent the great Socialist Party stalwart Meyer London to Washington before and after World War I. When it was redrawn into Brooklyn, it elected first Edna Kelly, the pioneering champion of “equal pay for equal work” protections for women, and then Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to mount a serious bid for the presidency. More recently, again as a primarily Manhattan-based district, it was represented by Carolyn Maloney, a chair of the House Oversight Committee and a steady champion of the Equal Rights Amendment and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. Now it is represented by Jerry Nadler , the great advocate for civil liberties, LGBTQ+ rights, and social justice, and the longtime top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, which he chaired during both of Donald Trump’s impeachments.

So it comes as no surprise that, with Nadler stepping down, the primary to replace him in the overwhelmingly Democratic district is shaping up as a referendum on where the Democratic Party, Congress, and the nation should head.

Or, to be more precise, several referendums.

Backers of New York State Assembly member Micah Lasher , a former aide to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Nadler who has the endorsement of both men and many of the influential Democratic clubs in the district, wouldn’t mind if the race were seen as a referendum on whether to maintain the retiring incumbent’s detail-oriented committee work and liberal advocacy.

For supporters of George Conway , the former Republican lawyer who in 2018 emerged as one of the president’s sharpest critics and has remained so ever since, the primary offers an opportunity to issue an unmistakable call to “bring back rule of law to our government and hold Trump and the GOP accountable.”

For Nina Schwalbe , a well-regarded healthcare researcher who has worked with UNICEF and USAID, this is a chance for Democrats to elect a policy expert with plans for strengthening the country’s existing public health infrastructure while advancing a practical agenda for “incrementally lowering Medicare eligibility until all Americans are covered.”

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For influencer and activist John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg—though you can call him “ Jack ”—this is, fairly or not, a test of whether the Kennedy name retains the magic that made his grandfather president and two of his uncles serious contenders for the job. (Schlossberg’s mother, Caroline Kennedy, just weighed in with a TV ad that suggested President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and former US Senator Edward Kennedy would be proud of the bid.)

All of those considerations are worthy of note in a congressional race. But none of them has generated the attention as the fight surrounding the other major contender in the contest, New York State Assembly member Alex Bores.

Bores—who, along with Lasher, has emerged as something of a front-runner in the race— is the central figure in a very different kind of referendum: what The New York Times refers to as an “ AI Proxy Fight ” and The Wall Street Journal describes as “ a Bitter AI War .”

At issue are separate but obviously intersecting questions about whether and how to regulate artificial intelligence, at a moment when polling shows that half of Americans fear AI will put someone they know (or, presumably, themselves) out of work, and according to a new Johns Hopkins University survey, “Most Americans, even those who most appreciate artificial intelligence, strongly support more regulation of it.” Specifically: “More than 70% of Americans want the right to interact with a human rather than an AI in medical, legal, educational, and government settings.”

Bores, a computer scientist by training, favors meaningful regulation. And he has a record of enacting it. As a member of the New York legislature, Bores and Democratic state Senator Andrew Gournardes championed what the congressional candidate describes as “the strongest AI safety law in the country.” That measure, the Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act , was approved last year and requires the largest artificial intelligence developers to develop safety plans and incident-reporting standards “to protect against automated crime, bioweapons and other widespread harm and risks to public safety.”

Bores says he wanted to develop “a bill at the state level because nothing was happening at the federal level.” That federal vacuum—at a time when President Trump spent much of 2025 cheerleading for the agenda of the worst pla…