Twelve Million Dollars to Squash One Man

The mailbox in my building has been broken for six weeks.

Not broken enough to get fixed. Just broken enough to make every envelope arrive bent, chewed, or half-visible, like a rat had reviewed it first. The super says parts are coming. Parts are always coming. The whole country is waiting for parts.

This morning I watched an old woman wrestle a fistful of campaign mail out of the slot. Glossy paper. Big faces. Bad teeth. The kind of democracy you can recycle if the recycling truck still shows up.

She looked at one flyer, made a noise like a sink backing up, and dropped it into the trash without reading the other side.

That, apparently, is where the future of artificial intelligence lives now.

In the trash can under the busted mailbox.

A New York assemblyman named Alex Bores tried to regulate advanced AI models. Not ban them. Not smash the servers with a hammer. Not drag Sam Altman through Times Square in a wooden cart while children threw fruit. He tried to put some rules around the big machines before the big machines got done putting rules around us.

For this sin, outside groups have spent roughly twelve million dollars supporting or attacking him in a congressional primary.

Twelve million dollars.

I like to say the number out loud because it has a nice stupid music to it. Twelve million dollars to tell voters in Manhattan that one state politician is wrong on AI, wrong for Congress, wrong for breakfast, wrong for the weather, wrong for whatever else the consultants can fit into a thirty-second ulcer.

There are people in this country who cannot get a dentist appointment. There are kids doing homework under fluorescent lights in apartments where the heat works like a rumor. There are men in emergency rooms making bargains with God and billing departments. But when one guy in Albany says maybe the owners of the thinking machines should write down what the machines might do before selling them to the planet, the money appears instantly.

Like Jesus with venture funding.

The story has all the rotten little decorations. A super PAC called Leading the Future. Of course it is called that. Nobody names a political money cannon something honest like Rich Men Panicking in a Basement. Close to seventy-five million dollars has flowed into the group from Silicon Valley heavyweights, including a co-founder of Palantir and a co-founder of OpenAI. Some of that firepower got pointed at Bores.

On the other side, Anthropic people and their allies backed him. Their money rode in wearing the white hat, or at least a hat that had been washed recently. Millions to defend him. Millions to attack his opponents. The AI companies turned a congressional primary into a proxy war with better typography.

If you were hoping for a clean story, go buy a children’s book.

Bores worked at Palantir. That matters. It should matter. Palantir is not a lemonade stand. It is one of those companies whose name sounds like a magic orb and whose business often involves government power staring very hard at people who did not ask to be stared at. He says he did not work with ICE and that the company’s ties to ICE helped push him out. He left money on the table. Generational money, he says.

Good. Maybe too late. Maybe not. People rarely exit the machine at the perfect moral moment. They hang around. They rationalize. They say they are doing the good projects. Opioid investigations. Veterans hospitals. Useful work. Real work. Then one day they look up and realize the building has more doors than exits.

I understand that part.

I have stayed in bad jobs too long. I have stayed in bad rooms too long. I have stayed in bad love too long because the rent was due and the bottle was half full and leaving meant becoming someone brave before breakfast. It is easy to demand purity from a distance. It is harder when your own hands are on the machinery and the paycheck clears.

The difference is that most of us don’t later get twelve million dollars of tech money arranged around our skulls like a halo made of knives.

This is the part nobody wants to say plainly: the AI giants are not just building tools. They are building weather. They want to be the atmosphere. They want to become the thing everybody breathes, and then they want to charge by the lungful.

Regulation bothers them because it reminds the room that air used to be free.

They talk about safety when safety helps them. They talk about innovation when innovation helps them. They talk about open futures, democratic access, public benefit, responsible development, all the little prayer cards of the new church. Then a state bill gets close enough to touch their incentives and suddenly the gloves come off and the mailers start breeding in the dark.

The funniest part, if your sense of humor has already been ruined, is that Bores’s bill was watered down anyway. Lobbyists and company people worked it over. The governor took concessions. The thing that passed was not exactly a guillotine. Some industry-linked group even supported the final version because it focused on the largest frontier labs and did not crush the smaller fry.

Still they came for him.

Not because one assemblyman can stop the machine by himself. He can’t. That is not the fear.

The fear is that somebody might make opposing them look normal.

That is how power works. It does not need to crush everyone. It only needs to crush enough people in public. It only needs to make the next person think about their mortgage, their family, their reputation, their inbox full of accusations written by some twenty-seven-year-old with a politics degree and the soul of a parking meter.

Wrong on AI.

Hypocrite.

Liar.

The words don’t need to be true. They need to be numerous. They need to arrive in the mailbox before breakfast. They need to make the old woman at my building sigh and throw the future away with the pizza coupons.

I keep thinking about the phrase “race condition.” Bores used it for AI development, the incentives pushing companies to put safety aside. In programming, a race condition happens when timing turns order into chaos. Two processes grab for the same thing, and the result depends on who gets there first.

That is politics now. That is technology now. That is the whole wheezing circus.

The companies race to build the machines. The politicians race to understand them. The lobbyists race to sand the laws down smooth. The consultants race to poison the candidate before the voter can learn his name. The public races to keep up while the rent rises and the mailbox breaks and the glossy lies keep coming.

Everybody is running except the people who have nowhere to go.

Maybe Bores is a principled man. Maybe he is an ambitious one. Usually the truth sleeps in the same bed with both and steals the blanket. I don’t need him to be a saint. Saints make lousy legislators anyway. They either get crucified or start committees.

What matters is simpler and uglier: a man touched the money nerve of the AI business, and the body reacted.

That tells you where the nerve is.

Not in the demos. Not in the speeches. Not in the smiling panels about the future of humanity. The nerve is in the possibility that someone, somewhere, might force the richest machine owners in history to answer a few questions before they scale their private fever dream across every desk, classroom, hospital, courthouse, and battlefield.

The nerve is accountability.

Touch it and watch the beast kick.

Downstairs, the trash can under the mailbox is full again. Faces, slogans, warnings. Democracy on card stock. A whole forest chopped down so billionaires can whisper into the hands of strangers.

The old woman will be back tomorrow. The super will say the parts are still coming. The machine will keep learning how to speak to us.

And somewhere a man with too much money will decide that twelve million was a bargain.

Source: A.I. Companies Don’t Know What to Do With Alex Bores