(Zero Hedge)—New York Assemblymember Alex Bores is launching a $30 million effort to unite Democrats behind a common artificial intelligence regulatory agenda ahead of the 2028 elections, taking the issue that defined his unsuccessful congressional campaign to a national stage.
His congressional run was bankrolled by Anthropic’s political money, a PAC funded with $20 million from the company and $401,250 from its employees, and his new group has not said who is funding it.
The organization, “Who Decides,” is launching Tuesday with Bores and his former chief of staff, Anna Myers, leading an effort to “build the winning Democratic answer to AI.” Its objective is to turn concerns about the technology into a shared platform for Democratic candidates, from presidential contenders to candidates further down the ballot.
“Who Decides’ goal is that by 2028, Democratic candidates from the top of the ticket on down run with a common AI safety agenda,” the group’s launch announcement states. “That means addressing the harms people already see and the broader danger that increasingly powerful and out-of-control systems could destabilize our economy, our democracy, and our safety.”
The group plans to concentrate on 11 states it identifies as important to the 2028 presidential primary and general election: South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Its plans include quarterly state and national polling, national conferences and partnerships with local organizations, Politico reports.
Those partnerships would bring together labor unions, parents, educators, civil-rights organizations, faith groups and other constituencies. The organization says it will work with those groups to develop AI policy positions and put them before candidates through questionnaires, forums, endorsements and briefings.
“We don’t let five people write the laws for hundreds of millions of Americans,” Bores says in the announcement, referring to the concentration of decision-making among AI executives. “There is no reason to let them write the rules for AI.”
An Organizing Push Ahead Of 2028
The launch follows a series of warnings from within the AI industry and competing political responses over how aggressively Washington should intervene. Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon warned last week that increasingly powerful AI could threaten humanity. Leaders at Anthropic and OpenAI subsequently called for slowing development so safety measures could keep pace.
Former President Barack Obama has urged Democrats to make AI a central political issue, with plans addressing both safety and the technology’s economic consequences. His comments included a call for the party’s 2028 presidential candidates to focus on the issue.
The launch comes days after AI techbros agreed that a ‘pause’ in development was needed along with new oversight (something Beijing won’t agree to). In a Saturday essay which set off the calls to slow down, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposes governance that lives largely inside the industry: third-party evaluators embedded in the labs on terms the labs set, with the right to publish their findings; coordination among frontier companies on safety standards, enabled by a narrow antitrust waiver from Washington; and, only later, agreements with foreign governments.
He calls federal regulation of every frontier lab the most effective approach but argues that passing laws takes time. Who Decides starts from the premise that “a few executives inside a handful of companies are making all the decisions,” and it refuses their money. The two efforts want many of the same rules, including published safety plans, incident reporting and independent testing of frontier models, and disagree about who should write them and how soon.
The industry’s safety wing has already bet on Bores once: Public First Action, a PAC funded by a $20 million Anthropic donation, spent $450,000 supporting him in the primary.
President Trump pushed in the opposite direction Monday, rejecting calls for additional restrictions and arguing that existing government powers were sufficient. He also warned that slowing American development could benefit China.
Incest Is Best?
Bores’ new group grew out of a campaign funded by Amodei’s network – which runs through Effective altruism. The same network produced METR, the evaluator Amodei’s essay names as his preferred watchdog – which itself was bankrolled largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Its most famous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, is in prison for fraud, and his $500 million stake in Anthropic, bought in 2022 with FTX customer funds, was liquidated in the exchange’s bankruptcy. Anthropic grew up inside that world: Moskovitz and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn funded its early rounds; Dario Amodei was an early signer of the movement’s giving pledge; his sister and co-founder Daniela is married to Holden Karnofsky, the Open Philanthropy co-founder who joined Anthropic last year; and the trust with power over the company’s board includes the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
Bores’ new group grew out of a campaign funded by Amodei’s network – which runs through effective altruism, a left-wing ‘movement’ that began with global poverty and animal welfare, preaches earning as much as possible in order to give it away, and over the past decade made preventing an AI catastrophe its central cause, bankrolled largely by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
The same network produced METR, the evaluator Amodei’s essay names as his preferred watchdog. The movement’s most famous adherent, Sam Bankman-Fried, is in prison for fraud, and his $500 million stake in Anthropic, bought in 2022 with what prosecutors said were FTX customer funds, was liquidated in the exchange’s bankruptcy. Anthropic grew up inside that world: Moskovitz and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn funded its early rounds; Dario Amodei was an early signer of the movement’s giving pledge; his sister and co-founder Daniela is married to Holden Karnofsky, the Open Philanthropy co-founder who joined Anthropic last year; and the trust with power over the company’s board includes the CEO of the Centre for Effective Altruism.
The same network reached Bores. Anthropic’s $20 million gift to Public First Action, which backed him, sits alongside $401,250 that Anthropic employees gave to campaigns supporting him. Who Decides’ pledge bans frontier-lab executives and corporate money – but doesn’t bar the philanthropies that fund the AI-safety field. The group won’t say who supplied the $10 million it has reportedly raised.
The movement has tried electoral politics before: in 2022, Bankman-Fried’s super PAC spent more than $10 million on Carrick Flynn’s House primary in Oregon (which Flynn lost).
Who Decides, meanwhile, is calling for an AI agenda that a future Democratic president could act on during the first 100 days in office.
From A Congressional Defeat To A National Campaign
Bores made AI regulation a central issue in his congressional primary campaign after helping pass New York’s RAISE Act. The legislation requires major frontier AI developers to publish safety plans and report critical safety incidents. Although he lost the primary, Bores and Myers describe the campaign as the foundation for their new organization.
“The lesson Bores and Myers took from those fights was that confronting the AI industry is fertile political ground and that public demand for answers on AI policy exists but remains scattered,” the announcement states.
The organization says it will reject “corporate money or contributions from senior executives at frontier AI companies.” Its website directs prospective donors to a Givebutter fundraising page.
The $30 million figure refers to the overall effort, rather than an established amount already raised. A New York Times report summarized by Techmeme says the nonprofit has raised $10 million and plans to seek another $20 million in 2027.
For Bores and Myers, the stated task is to turn separate concerns about AI into a coordinated political program.
“What’s missing is a coalition capable of turning that energy into a governing consensus before the technology, the economic dislocation, and the partisan battle lines harden,” the launch announcement says.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
