The $27 Million AI War Ends in a Draw (And Nobody Noticed)

Anthropic on one side, OpenAI on the other. They're not suing each other or trading insults on social media (at least, not directly). Instead, they decided to wage a proxy war in New York's 12th Congressional district, where local voters were choosing their next representative. The battleground? A controversial state assemblyman named Alex Bores.

The story is both funny and unsettling. Bores became a political lightning rod after being targeted by a pro-AI super PAC (think: a bank account with no spending limits, designed to push candidates who agree with you). The idea was simple: Bores was skeptical about AI, so someone very wealthy decided to teach him a lesson with a $27 million campaign. Here's the ironic twist: the guy became more popular precisely because they attacked him.

Election night arrived, and so did the anticlimax. Bores lost, but barely. It wasn't a landslide for the AI-friendly candidate. It wasn't a crushing defeat for the skeptic. It was a draw. Anthropic and OpenAI essentially set $27 million on fire, and the result was... meh. A guy who's skeptical about AI lost to someone who probably doesn't hate AI, but isn't exactly hugging it either.

Here's what's actually wild: barely anyone is talking about this. There's no bombshell headline screaming 'Two Tech Giants Just Interfered in a Local Election.' It stayed inside the tech bubble while everyone else scrolls TikTok cat videos. Those $27 million vanished into clouds of targeted ads, algorithmic campaigns, and paid influencers — completely invisible to regular people.

And that's the real issue. It's not whether AI is good or evil; it's that tech money is quietly rewriting American politics, and we're all just watching funny videos. Big tech companies don't just do lobbying anymore. Now they jump directly into local races, spend absurd amounts of cash, and when they tie or lose, they just shrug and wait for the next opportunity. Meanwhile, most voters have no idea this war even happened.