Alex Bores on AI Regulation, Industry Opposition, and Tech Policy

The AI Industry's Opposition to Bores

• 🎯 Alex Bores, a New York State Assemblymember and candidate for Congress, is being targeted by a new $100 million AI super PAC called Leading the Future.
• 💡 This opposition stems from Bores's prominent role in pushing for AI regulation at the state level, particularly through the RAISE Act.
• 💰 The AI industry views state-level regulation as an existential threat, leading to significant financial backing against Bores's campaign.

The RAISE Act and AI Safety Standards

• 📜 The RAISE Act aims to establish safety standards for advanced AI research, requiring major frontier labs (like Meta, Google, OpenAI) to disclose public safety plans and critical safety incidents.
• ⚠️ A key provision prevents the release of models that fail the companies' own safety tests, drawing a parallel to the tobacco industry's past denial of health risks.
• ⚖️ The bill includes fines for violations, though the initial proposal for fines based on training costs was adjusted to a maximum of $10 million and $30 million due to New York's preference against uncapped penalties.

Defining Frontier Models and Addressing Concerns

• 🔬 The RAISE Act applies to companies spending over $100 million on compute for final model training, or those training a model that itself cost $100 million and involved 10^26 FLOPs.
• 🧠 It also addresses models trained via knowledge distillation, a technique used by China to circumvent US compute export controls.
• 🚫 While the RAISE Act focuses on safety, other legislative efforts address discrimination and the