AI-focused Super Pacs have raised roughly $100m this cycle, of which $44m has been spent so far, in dozens of congressional races across the country. Nearly half of all spending has converged on a single Manhattan race: Tuesday’s Democratic primary in the district of NY-12.

And much of that spending has targeted a single candidate: Democratic assemblymember Alex Bores, who is running to represent New York’s 12th House district. Bores, who worked in tech before his pivot to politics, has found himself at the unlikely center of a proxy battle for the industry’s tussle for regulatory influence.

The frenzy began a year ago, when Bores sponsored the Raise Act, the second-ever US state law requiring major AI developers to publish public safety plans. By August, his congressional campaign was under siege – attack ads on TV, by text, in the mail. The effort has been funded by Think Big, an affiliate of Leading the Future, a new bipartisan network of Super Pacs created to back “pro-AI” candidates, which has poured $8.2m into the primary.

Just four donors fund its $75m war chest: venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman with his wife, Anna, according to data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC). Like most of Silicon Valley, the group advocates for regulating AI with a federal framework, instead of a patchwork of state laws – a compliance minefield that will hand the AI race to China, tech firms warn.

However, Leading the Future’s anti-Bores ad blitz triggered a counter-assault by a different set of Super Pacs advocating for stronger AI safeguards. They include You Can Push Back, funded by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, and Jobs and Democracy, the Democrat-focused subsidiary of the Public First – a network of Super Pacs, founded by Brad Carson, a former Democratic congressman from Oklahoma.

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Combined, the tech-funded Pacs have spent $11m on the NY-12 race to counteract Leading the Future’s messaging, with ads claiming “rightwing billionaires” are trying to buy the seat, whereas Bores is “standing up to Big Tech”. It’s turned the race, as Carson put it, into “the AI civil war.”

Bores, meanwhile, has turned the primary into a referendum: “This is the first congressional race in the country where the dividing line is: can we regulate AI at all?” he says in a campaign video. Formerly considered the underdog in a competitive race, polls suggest Bores is now in a tight race with Micah Lasher, a New York assemblymember who has also campaigned in favor of AI guardrails and curbing Big Tech’s influence. “They’ve made Alex Bores into a national star,” said Carson.

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Among the House races seeing the most cash from both Leading the Future and Public First are those at the center of the rural datacenter roll-out. The Pacs have spent millions to elect AI-friendly candidates in primaries across Utah, Texas, Ohio, Georgia and Kentucky, despite local backlash to datacenters.