Ezra Klein, produced by Annie Galvin, Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores? NYTimes, April 21, 2026.
From the introduction:
If you are living in New York’s 12th Congressional District, you may have seen these endless attacks on Alex Bores, one of the Democrats running there.
Yikes. Bores did work for Palantir. The rest of that attack is not what you might call true, but what interests me is who is paying for it: the super PAC Leading the Future and its subsidiary Think Big.
Who funds the super PAC Leading the Future? Well, among their largest donors are the co-founders of OpenAI, Andreessen Horowitz and — wait for it — Palantir.
So why is a co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, in this case, funding a super PAC to try to destroy a candidate on the grounds that he once worked for Palantir? The reason is that Leading the Future is a super PAC dedicated to destroying anyone who might regulate the tech industry, in general, or A.I., specifically, in a way these funders don’t like.
And Bores is a member of the New York State Assembly. He co-wrote and passed the RAISE Act, one of the first pieces of A.I. regulation passed in any major state.
From deep in the discussion:
Klein: Have you thought about the change in public opinion? Because it looks to me like we’re seeing a pretty powerful A.I. backlash rising.
You have polls showing now that more Americans are worried about A.I. than are enthusiastic about it. There’s a lot of counter-data center energy playing out throughout the country.
What have you made of how quickly the politics have shifted beneath A.I.?
Bores: That surprised me. Both how many people have focused on it, but also how bipartisan it has remained.
You, of all people, know about polarization — and most issues end up polarized. This one hasn’t so far. It has resisted that longer than I thought it would.
If you talk to voters, across Republicans, Democrats and independents, you see pretty similar attitudes; across state legislators, pretty similar attitudes; even in Congress, there’s more bipartisanship than you would think.
Surveys regularly show that about 10 percent of people want to put the A.I. genie back in the bottle, to pretend it never existed. I empathize, but I don’t think that’s the way forward. Ten percent of people represented by the super PAC Leading the Future want to just let it rip.
That is the super PAC that’s attacking you.
Yes. They want to just let it rip. They don’t care how many people it hurts, just how fast it moves.
Eighty percent of Americans see some benefits. But they also see a lot of risk and think it’s moving too fast and want to have some say in its development. The fact that it has stayed so bipartisan has surprised me, and also the fact that it has risen up in people’s minds so much has surprised me.
Has the pessimism around it surprised you? We were talking earlier about the period when there was a lot of optimism about tech, about software, about the internet.
I think you can really look from early computers, the early internet, all the way pretty late into the social media era.
Probably around Trump things begin to turn — Cambridge Analytica, algorithmic feeds. But that’s a long time when these systems and technologies are present for people, and there’s a fundamental optimism about them.
A.I. — ChatGPT, I think, is when this really burst into public consciousness. It’s 2023. We’re here in 2026, and the polling has already turned negative. The week before we recorded this, Sam Altman was targeted in two separate violent attacks. There was a Molotov cocktail thrown at his home.
Awful.
Two other people shot at his door.
I was a little shocked to see people celebrating these attacks online, saying: Where can we support the bail fund?
Yes.
This has moved into fury and fear and pessimism really, really quickly. Why do you think that is?
Well, there was a separate split in A.I. around capabilities. The debate used to be: Is this real or is it stochastic parrots? But usually, even before that: Is it just slop that is never going to actually replace a human?
Fancy autocomplete.
Exactly. Exactly. We had these debates on one dimension, which was: Is it good for people? Is it bad for people?
And then there was this other dimension: How big of an impact is it going to have? And I think that debate has collapsed. People are not skeptical of its power anymore — or some are, but fewer and fewer each day.
The intensity with which we’re having that first debate has really ramped up. But I think it has also been that we saw what happened with social media.
We saw what happened with these previous revolutions that were supposed to change everything for the better. We’ve seen platforms established with great promise, and then over time, once they get power, really turn on their users.
People are no longer willing to believe the story that is told about a technology or a platform always benefiting people. You see this argument from some of the A.I. founders. They say: Well, it will create material abundance for everyone. There will be no more poverty. Everyone will have everything.
And everyone is looking around saying: Of course, that’s not what’s going to happen. You’re a private company — you’re going to profit, you’re going to keep it all for yourself.
Sam Altman recently said it will be like a utility. But utilities are really highly regulated.
People are just not willing to believe that spin anymore, and yet they’re seeing changes in their lives really quickly.
Jasmine Sun, the A.I. writer, just wrote this interesting piece on A.I. populism. I thought the way she defined it was interesting — and a little more subtle than you normally hear.
She wrote:
I define A.I. populism as a worldview in which A.I. is viewed not only as a normal technology but as an elite political project to be resisted.
What she’s getting at there is that A.I. populism and the A.I. backlash tend to include two dimensions.
One is that this technology is being overhyped. The other, as it’s often put to me in emails, is that it is being pushed down our throats. That it’s not a thing people want, it is a thing being forced upon them.
Now there’s all this investment behind it. The investment needs to be paid off, so the companies really have to do it. If you take the power seriously, you see it in a different way — almost like any version of having A.I. in the economy is going to just be a way of paying off these huge investments, that we are not getting the technology we want, we are having a new paradigm forced upon us.
How do you think about that?
I think it’s a beautiful description. What I hear from my neighbors is very much the feeling that this is moving so quickly. That we don’t have control. And the American people, so far, have not had a say in it. So I think the first part of that definition, of the belief in its capabilities, that part is shrinking as part of the dialogue as we’re seeing it do more and more.
But the fact that it is being thrown at us, and we currently don’t have control, I think is what has motivated so many people to be thinking about A.I.
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