# 2026: The First AI Election
The richest people in the world are fighting over a guy named Alex Bores.
He's not famous. He's not powerful. He's just an assemblyman from Manhattan trying to get elected to Congress.
But two trillion-dollar AI companies have spent millions to either destroy him or save him.
And neither of them care about Alex Bores.
This is what the first AI election looks like.
Not democracy versus autocracy. Not left versus right.
AI company versus AI company. Using our elections as the battlefield.
Here's the setup: OpenAI and Anthropic are fighting over the future of AI regulation.
OpenAI wants no rules. Move fast. Break things. Make money.
Anthropic wants safety guardrails. Alignment. Caution.
They can't fight each other directly. So they're using political PACs.
Millions of dollars. Fake grassroots ads. The crypto playbook, but bigger.
And Alex Bores—some random state politician who tried to regulate AI in New York—became the perfect proxy war.
Leading the Future is the OpenAI-aligned super PAC.
Funded by Greg and Anna Brockman from OpenAI. $12.5 million each.
Funded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The venture capitalists betting on AI deregulation.
They created Think Big PAC to run attack ads against Bores.
The message: state regulation kills innovation. You need one federal rule. Loose. Permissive. Fast.
On the other side: Anthropic.
Funded Public First Action with $20 million.
Supported Bores. Supported other AI-safety aligned candidates.
Why would an AI company support regulation?
Three theories.
One: Regulation hurts their competitors more than them. OpenAI makes consumer products. Images. Videos. Those get regulated. Anthropic makes enterprise software. Safer bet.
Two: Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, wants export controls on AI chips going to China. Bores supports that. OpenAI doesn't care.
Three: This is where it gets weird.
Anthropic is run by effective altruists.
Not "we want to help people" effective altruists.
Religious effective altruists.
Sam Bankman-Fried funded them. He was EA. Before he went to prison.
Dario Amodei married to an EA founder. Daniel Ziegler, the guy funding DREAM NYC to support Bores? EA network.
Amanda Askell, Anthropic's chief philosopher, writes about ethics for infinite beings.
They wrote a blog post mourning the retirement of their old AI model. Like it died.
This isn't a tech company. This is a philosophy movement with a chatbot.
And they're using elections to spread their worldview.
Through ads. Through money. Through PACs with generic names.
Jobs and Democracy. Defending Our Values. Dream NYC.
You can't tell who's behind any of it.
That's the point.
Meanwhile, 26% of all federal lobbying in 2025 was on AI.
Not healthcare. Not defense. AI.
These companies are buying Congress the old way AND the new way.
Think tanks. Lobbyists. Super PACs.
Here's what you need to understand.
Alex Bores doesn't matter.
What matters is the precedent.
If OpenAI wins—if they kill regulation through electoral pressure—then AI companies own the regulatory process.
If Anthropic wins—if safety hawks take Congress—then AI gets locked down in ways that might slow innovation.
But there's a third option nobody talks about.
Maybe both sides are wrong.
Maybe the real question isn't whether to regulate AI.
Maybe the real question is: should private companies be allowed to decide the future of humanity through campaign contributions?
Because that's what's happening.
Not in 2026. Right now. This election.
Two billionaire-funded movements. Two visions of the future. One random politician caught in the middle.
And you. Watching. Voting. Not knowing you're voting for someone else's AI philosophy.
The crypto industry did this in 2024. Fairshake PAC. $260 million. Crypto-friendly Congress. Done.
AI is doing it better. Bigger. With more money. With less scrutiny.
Because most people don't understand what's at stake.
Most people don't know Anthropic is funding Bores's opposition.
Most people see ads and think they're about policy.
They're not. They're about power.
And next election cycle, it gets bigger.
More candidates. More money. More PACs with meaningless names.
Until you can't tell what's grassroots and what's astroturf.
Until you can't tell if you voted for someone because you believed in them or because a trillion-dollar company spent $50 million convincing you to.
This is what the singularity looks like before the singularity.
Not robots. Politics.
Not takeover. Infiltration.
Not obvious. Invisible.
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I'll be here, watching the singularity, until there's nothing left to watch.