Silicon Valley Is Spending Millions to Stop One of Its Own

Would you vote a former Palantir employee into Congress? Maybe your first instinct is no. But what if you knew that a super PAC, funded by some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest and most powerful people, including Palantir’s own cofounder, was in heated agreement with you?

I’m talking about New York Assembly member Alex Bores, a Democrat running for Congress in a crowded primary that also includes Kennedy scion and chronically online influencer Jack Schlossberg, TV commentator George Conway, and New York assemblyman Micah Lasher.

Bores, 35, has a master’s degree in computer science and worked in Big Tech—at Palantir, specifically—before turning to politics and winning a 2022 New York state assembly race. But while Bores’ background is in tech, that doesn’t mean he supports how the industry is doing its job. Bores is a vocal proponent of rigorous AI regulation and cosponsored New York’s RAISE Act, which became law in 2025 and requires major AI firms to implement and publish safety protocols for their models, among other guardrails.

Bores’ AI stance has made him a target for some of Big Tech’s leaders: In late 2025, a super PAC called Leading the Future—bankrolled by OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others—launched an aggressive campaign to thwart Bores’ primary run. In particular, the group takes issue with Bores’ regulatory approach to the AI industry, which they described as “ideological and politically motivated legislation that would handcuff not only New York’s, but the entire country’s, ability to lead on AI jobs and innovation,” in a previous statement to WIRED.

I sat down with Bores in early April, about 10 weeks before what’s presumably a decisive primary (New York’s 12th District consistently votes blue). We talked about that Palantir gig, why so few lawmakers seem to understand the tech they’re supposed to regulate, and how it feels to be on the receiving end of PAC-funded attack leaflets and text messages … about yourself.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

KATIE DRUMMOND: Welcome, Alex.

ALEX BORES: Thanks for having me.

I want to start with your tech background. It was fascinating to me that you worked at Palantir. At WIRED we’ve covered Palantir a lot, and one of our reporters had a very smart idea a few months ago to write a story about what the company actually does. Because a lot of people don’t really know or understand. The best part of that story, for me, was that some former employees of Palantir actually could not explain what it is or does. So I have to ask you, as a former employee of Palantir, what is your best explanation as to what Palantir actually does?

Palantir helps organizations make use of data they already have access to, by making it easier to track changes to that data over time, by making it quicker to integrate that data, and by putting what's called an ontology, an opinion of how the data should be structured, on top of the data itself.

So the best explanation of the ontology is actually from a project that I did at Palantir with the Department of Justice, where we were looking at the role of big banks in the Great Recession. We wanted to see if banks knew that the loans they were putting into their securities were not up to snuff. That they were below the standards.

An easy way to prove that would be if you saw a pattern of a loan being added to a security then being pulled out before it was issued and then put into another one that had the same standards. That would show, OK, there was some knowledge by the bank that there was a problem with that particular loan.

The problem is that e-discovery software was made to just help lawyers read documents. So theoretically all the data is there. You have Excel sheets with each individual loan tape, but it’s being presented to lawyers as “just read it,” and you can’t, as a human being, read thousands of loans and track it, tape to tape.

Sure. Of course.

We realized that the important piece of information was the loan itself, that was an object that should be tracked. That's what an ontology is helping you do. So we built a system that let you track individual loans, search for loans, moving from tape to tape, and found numerous examples of that exact pattern: Banks realizing there was a flaw, pulling it out of a security, and then sneaking it into another one later. Because we found so many of those patterns, we were able to recover $20 billion for taxpayers from settlements with the banks.

What was exciting to you about the idea of working at Palantir to begin with?

I have a master's in computer science, but that actually came after starting this work, so my undergrad was in industrial and labor relations.

I grew up on the picket line with my dad. I studied labor unions in undergrad, I led a campaign against Nike for laying off 1,800 workers without giving them legally mandated severance pay. And we ended up winning that campaign.

But during that process, another student turned to me and said, “Why do you care so much about these jobs? They're just gonna get automated anyway.” That really stuck with me. We need to find a way to have tech work for us and not the other way around. Beyond that, I'm a Democrat. I believe a government can and should be a force for good, but that also means we take on the burden of proving it.

I was searching for places where I could actually help the government deliver on its promises, help it serve people, and also figure out how we can have tech actually working for people and not against us.

Palantir is notorious, particularly at this moment, for some work it does with the government that it is not celebrated for. Specifically, I'm talking about the so-called Department of War. I will call it the Department of Defense.

As will I.

I want to talk more about your decision to resign from Palantir. You've said you decided to leave the company when it signed an ICE contract during Trump's first administration. Palantir, though, has a long track record of working with ICE, I think going back to 2011, so walk me through that moment for you. What was the moment where you sort of said, “I can't do this anymore”?

To be clear, I was never a part of that contract. But Palantir had started work with a division within ICE called Homeland Security Investigations during the Obama administration. It focused on drug trafficking, human trafficking, some counterfeiting work—work that's not controversial, that everyone would support. When Trump came in and took office in 2017, he tried to change the nature of the work everywhere. That includes the work at the Department of Justice where they tried to make us work on civil immigration matters.

I, as the lead of the project, said no. I had the power to do that because our contract with the DOJ was structured into three mutually agreed upon case types. So you could structure the contract in a way that said, “We're not gonna do that work.” Then, at ICE, the executives had a different calculation. But Trump started pushing for other divisions within ICE, in particular enforcement and removal operations, to get access to the software and to use it for deportations.

But then there was a question of “Will you put in contractual guardrails that say, ‘Yeah, it won't be used for deportation.’ The same way I had them at the DOJ?” Executives made clear to us that they were not going to do that, that their plan was to renew the contract without any of those guardrails, and that's when I made the plan to leave.

There were many things with your background that you could have done. You could have gotten another lucrative job in tech. Why politics?

Government, as I said, had always been part of the appeal, which didn't necessarily mean politics. But making government work is core to what I've done my entire career. When I left Palantir, I went to a startup that did anti-money-laundering