When political candidates rehearse for campaign debates, they commonly cast a surrogate in the role of their rival. Rob Portman, who represented Ohio in the Senate for a dozen years, played Al Gore for George W. Bush, and Barack Obama for both John McCain and Mitt Romney. The thirty-five-year-old New York State assemblyman Alex Bores, a candidate in the pullulating Democratic primary for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District, opted instead to enlist a chatbot. This might seem like his generation’s path of least resistance. Bores, however, who has a neatly trimmed beard and wears a navy suit for any and all occasions, comes across as the sort of very good boy who does more homework than is strictly necessary. Just after the new year, I joined him on a road trip to Albany for the opening of the legislative session. Bores takes pride in his functional competence, and upon being told that he would not be the one driving—his chief of staff, Anna Myers, wanted him on the phone to thank donors—he accepted the passenger seat with some reluctance. To Myers’s mild exasperation, he prioritized a round of “birthday calls,” a regular practice he extends to family, friends, and people he once bumped into on the subway.
Bores grew up on the Upper East Side; his parents worked in network television, and in his first major media appearance, as a three-year-old, his mother read him “Everyone Poops” on ABC7 Eyewitness News. He traces his political commitments to second grade, when his father brought him to a union picket line, and he carried a sign that read “Disney is mean to my dad.” Before turning to public service, Bores worked in the software industry, including for the defense contractor Palantir, where he has described working on epidemic preparedness, V.A.-hospital staffing, and other projects related to government efficiency. He now advertises himself as New York’s first Democratic elected official with a computer-science degree. (Two were elected the same day.) As a youthfully industrious Assembly member, he devoted much of his tenure to the nascent matter of A.I. regulation. This was a niche agenda in those days—which is to say, a year ago—but he was already a habitual A.I. user. At his office in Albany, he told me he had worked with Stanford-affiliated researchers to feed the entirety of the state’s legal code into a specially designed A.I. tool. He instructed the system to find examples of outdated, nonsensical, or discriminatory provisions—“zombie laws that were clogging up our system,” as he described them. It returned from an afternoon of work with more than four thousand suggestions, including Article 10-B of the New York General Business law, one section of which mandates the speedy delivery of international money orders delivered by steamboat, and Labor Law Section 203-A, which decreed that all elevators be furnished with chairs. Less hilariously, New York Domestic Relations Law Section 13-AA required that any applicant for a marriage license who “is not of the Caucasian, Indian or Oriental race” first submit to a test for sickle-cell anemia.
It was only natural that his debate prep would feature a chatbot—specifically Claude Cowork, an “agentic” assistant, developed by Anthropic, that can execute multistep instructions on its own. The upcoming panel, he explained to Claude, would feature the other two front-runners in what’s currently a nine-way contest: Micah Lasher, who is a forty-four-year-old member of the New York State Assembly, a former mayoral aide to Michael Bloomberg, and a Democratic-establishment favorite; and Jack Schlossberg, a social-media influencer who, as the thirty-three-year-old grandson of President John F. Kennedy, is Democratic-establishment royalty. Schlossberg is known for having once submitted to X the question of who was “way hotter,” Second Lady Usha Vance or the former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. When asked to explain such a bizarre inquiry, Schlossberg defended it as a provocative demonstration of trollery: “The internet is a nuance-destruction machine—there’s no room for qualifying anything, ever. You have to be very controversial to break through.” It’s unclear what it would have looked like for Schlossberg to promote a nuanced discussion of the relative sex appeal of his late grandmother, but he has a talent for aura-farming. In one early poll, Schlossberg led the Twelfth Congressional District race with twenty-two per cent.
