JEFFRIES vs. MAMDANI! NY-12 Heats Up the House! Digging Into the Anthropic Debacle (with Andrew Mayne)

All eyes are on New York. The congressional primaries happen tonight, and in a city this Democratic, many of these races will effectively decide who heads to Congress. What I’m watching is a battle between Hakeem Jeffries and Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani is flexing. We’re going to see exactly how much of a kingmaker he is in New York City. Jeffries is backing incumbents like Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Mamdani is backing candidates including Brad Lander and Darlisa Avila Chevalier. The big question is whether Mamdani’s endorsements can translate into wins, especially against somebody as entrenched as Espaillat.

The race that really has my attention, though, is New York’s 12th Congressional District. Jerry Nadler is retiring, and what has followed is an absolute clown car of a race. Micah Lasher would be my favorite to win, but he’s the least interesting candidate in the field. George Conway, once one of the chief architects of turning the Monica Lewinsky scandal into the political force that it became and later one of the most notable Never Trump Republicans in America, is running as a Democrat. Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, is also in the race. And then there’s Alex Bores, a New York Assembly member who has become the main character of this contest thanks to his relationship with AI.

Politics Politics Politics is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The polling has been all over the place. Early on, Schlossberg led thanks to the Kennedy name. More recent polling has Lasher ahead, with Bores close behind and a huge chunk of the electorate still undecided. That’s important because Bores has become the center of one of the strangest political fights I’ve ever seen. Roughly $26 million has poured into this House race because of his support for the RAISE Act, a proposal to regulate artificial intelligence at the state level.

The two major companies in artificial intelligence, OpenAI and Anthropic, have very different views on how to regulate AI. A super PAC supported by OpenAI leadership in a personal capacity spent money attacking Bores, arguing that splintered state regulations would hurt the industry. Anthropic-aligned groups responded by spending even more money. Do they support the RAISE Act? Who knows. They want OpenAI’s effort to fail, and that’s what makes fight this so unusual. All of this is far less about Alex Bores and more about two AI companies using a congressional primary as a venue for a much larger argument.

I know politics, and I understand the influence of super PACs. I’ve never seen a personal beef quite like this one. Anthropic hates OpenAI, and it’s not a secret. Their CEO, Dario Amodei, does not believe OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman is trustworthy. Anthropic’s view is that it needs to out-innovate OpenAI and become the market leader. At the same time, I think the anti-Bores effort made strategic mistakes. The ads were so ham-fisted that they gave him life he otherwise would not have had. The spending has even become controversial inside OpenAI. And tonight’s the night we find out whether any of it even mattered.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Intro

00:05:34 - Jeffries vs. Mamdani

00:10:04 - NY-12

00:20:50 - Update

00:22:00 - Keir Starmer

00:26:50 - Israel

00:31:35 - Congress

00:34:29 - Intro to Attention Mechanism

00:38:16 - Attention Mechanism with Andrew Mayne

01:43:58 - Wrap-up