Silicon Valley Is Spending Millions to Stop One of Its Own

0:00Not feeling the spring energy yet? You're not behind. With Grow Therapy, you can start small, like talking to someone who gets it. Covered by insurance, built for real progress. Whether it's your first time in therapy or your 50th, Grow makes it easier to find a therapist who fits you, not the other way around. They connect you with thousands of independent, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights, and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability, and get started in as little as two days. And if something comes up, you can cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost.

0:37There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow helps you find therapy on your time. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Grow accepts over 100 insurance plans. Sessions average about$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. Visit growtherapy.com slash PRX today to get started. That's growtherapy.com slash PRX. growtherapy.com slash PRX. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Ask any small business owner. They'll tell you that finances get messy quick. A bank account here, a spreadsheet there with tax and invoicing apps stacked on top.

1:17Before long, you were buried in expensive tools behind on books and unsure where your business really stands. That's why there's Found. Found identifies the tasks that create the most hassle for small businesses. Things like categorizing expenses, preparing for taxes, managing invoicing and budgeting. And they built an app that does it all directly from your business checking account. They've automated things like tracking expenses, finding write-offs and budgeting for tax time. You can even send invoices for free and pay your contractors. All from one app. found makes it easy to regain control of your business finances so you can get back to doing what you love take back control of your business today open a found account for free at found.com that's f-o-u-n-d dot com found is a financial technology company not a bank banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic join the hundreds of thousands who've already streamlined their finances with found

2:17From Wired, this is The Big Interview, where we get to know the people behind the headlines in conversations that explore the intersection of technology, power, and culture. I'm Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. And they may seem pretty far off, but the midterm elections are actually closer than they appear. Here on The Big Interview, we'll be talking to candidates from across the country who are shaking up their races. Today, we're speaking to a candidate from right here in New York, Assemblyman Alex Boras. Boras is running for Congress in a very crowded race to represent the city's 12th congressional district, a consistently blue one.

2:51Like many New Yorkers, the first time I heard about him was when I saw those ads. Meet Alex Boras. He's got a master's in computer science, but he's an expert in hypocrisy. The ads are funded by the pro-AI pack Leading the Future, and they take direct aim at Boraz's previous experience as a Palantir employee. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling the tech for ICE, enabling ICE, and powering their deportations while making bank. If you're wondering why the industry he used to work in is now lobbying against him, well, that's because Boraz has become a vocal advocate for AI safety and regulation.

3:27It's actually a cornerstone of his campaign, which he joins me now to talk about. Welcome, Alex. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for being here. It was so delightful to hear those ads again. They are particularly nasty. We are definitely going to get to them. We're going to talk all about those ads and your response to them. But I actually want to start with your tech background. It was fascinating to me to realize that you had actually worked at Palantir. You've been very open about this. The company has been called, in turns, a data broker, a data miner. And actually, at Wired, we cover Palantir a ton.

3:58And one of our reporters very smartly had the idea a few months ago of doing a story to try to answer the question, what does Palantir actually do? And the best part of that story to me was that some of the former employees of Palantir she spoke to actually could not explain what Palantir is or does. And 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 that 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.

4:49So 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 big banks' role in the Great Recession. And we wanted to see if banks knew that the loans that they were putting into their securities were not up to snuff. And 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, okay, there was some knowledge by the bank that that particular loan, there was a problem with it.

5:25The problem is that e-discovery software was made to just help lawyers read documents. And 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 a thousand loans and track it tape to tape to tape. Sure, of course. We realized that the important piece of information was the loan itself, that that was an object that should be tracked. That's what an ontology is helping you do. And 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.

6:01Banks realizing there was a flaw, pulling it out of a security, and then sneaking it into another one later. And because we found so many of those patterns, we were able to recover$20 billion for taxpayers from settlements with the banks. So this, I suppose, would be an example of Palantir for good. You sound very excited about ontology as it pertains to data. What was exciting to you about the idea of working at Palantir to begin with? I mean, your background is, if I'm not mistaken, in tech. You have a degree in computer science? I have a master's in computer science, but that actually came after starting this work.

6:35So my undergrad was in industrial and labor relations. Oh, interesting. I grew up actually 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. We got Nike to about face and pay the workers the money they were owed. But during that process, another student turned to me and said, why do you care so much about these jobs? They're just going to get automated anyway. And that really stuck with me that we need to find a way to have tech work for us and not the other way around.

7:09And beyond that, I'm a Democrat. I believe that government can and should be a force for good. But that also means we take on the burden of proving it. So I was searching for places where I could actually help government deliver on its promises, help it serve people, and also figure out, again, how we can have tech actually working for people and not against us. Now, Palantir is notorious, particularly in this moment, for some work it does with the government that it is maybe not celebrated for. Specifically, I'm obviously talking about the so-called Department of War. I will call it the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, as will you.

7:45Excellent. And of course, ICE. And I want to talk more about your decision to resign from Palantir. So 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 mean, I think going back to something like 2011. So walk me through that moment for you. I mean, what was the moment where you sort of said, I can't do this anymore or I'm choosing not to do this? I'm so curious about that. Yeah, this was work that I, to be clear, never worked on myself. I was never a part of that contract.

8:18But Palantir had started work with a division within ICE called Homeland Security Investigations during the Obama administration. And it focused on anti-drug trafficking, anti-human trafficking, some counterfeiting work, work that's not controversial that everyone would support. And then 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. And I, as the leader of the project, said no. And I had the power to do that because our contract with the DOJ was structured that it was three mutually agreed upon case types.

8:53So you could structure the contract in a way that said we're not going to do that work. Then at ICE, the executives had a different calculation or a different decision. 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 on, well, 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. And 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.

9:31And that's when I made the plan to leave. And so you left your lucrative tech job. I mean, I assume it was lucrative. These jobs tend to be. And I left, you know, I went to a startup and I'm not crying poverty in any piece there, but I was granted a number of options in, I think it was in 2018, if not, it was late 2017, intended to make senior leadership stay at the company and intended to make people who were having contributions stay. And when I left, the vast majority, if not all, of that additional grant had not vested. So I did leave a substantial amount of money on the table, but my principles were more important to me.

10:11So you left Palantir. You went to work at a startup. There were many, many things with your background that you could have done. You could have gotten another lucrative job in tech. Politics, Alex. Why? Yeah. Yeah. Government, as I said, had always been part of the appeal, which didn't necessarily mean politics. It didn't mean electoral work. But making government work is core to what I've done my entire career. So when I left Palantir, I went to a startup that did anti-money laundering work, counterterrorist financing work. From there, I went to another startup that helped municipalities and states distribute aid during COVID.

10:50So you have legislator will pass a program that's like, here's X millions of dollars for aid. But if you don't actually have the system set up and you don't identify, hey, which customers are really struggling with their utility bills and need this and help them through the process, a lot of these programs were just expiring. And we would come in and actually get the money to the people that needed it. There was one project in Louisville where we helped families keep their water on and pay their utility bill. And so it was about making government work. And then the seat that I'm currently in in the state assembly opened up and had a lot of conversations with friends, one of whom said, you know, you're always talking about how you are down.

11:24downstream of bad policy, trying to fix it with tech, here's your chance to go upstream and design it right the first time. And second of all, you know, run for it. You don't know if you're going to win. But if you do win and it's awful and it's just mudslinging and it's what everyone thinks of as politics and you can't be effective, in two years, in four years, you quit. You go back to what you're doing now. But you can't in two to four years say, now I'm going to run for the open seat. All right. This is a moment in time. That's a good friend. That's good advice. A very good friend. And so I ran, I won, and I found it to be even better than expected.

11:57Why? Because you actually can get things done. If you put your head down and you ignore the noise and you're determined and you build coalitions, eventually they run out of reasons not to do your bill. I've passed 30 bills in my time in the state legislature, which is about the same amount Congress as a whole passed in 2023. I was named by the Center for Effective Lawmaking, which is a nonprofit that ranks Congress members and state legislators throughout the country as the most effective new legislator from New York City, I've been able to really get some things done and help to improve the lives of my neighbors.

12:31Well, and your background is particularly interesting in the context of politics. And you said, I think it was in 2022, quote, one person in Albany should know how tech works. You presumably know a lot more about technology than your average lawmaker. I mean, I think we've all seen these just like extraordinarily painful congressional testimonies that will be going on. And you'll you'll watch a very high profile politician sort of basically be like, beep, boop, bop, phone does what? Social network is is how? There are some shocking clips that we have all seen and cringed at and sort of just felt they're funny, but there's also this sort of like sick feeling in your stomach when you realize the people in charge of setting the agenda from a regulatory perspective have no idea what they're talking about.

13:24I mean, I feel that way all the time. I have felt that way for more than a decade now as we've sort of navigated this social media fallout and everything that has happened with the Facebooks of the world. And yet there has been no meaningful regulation over and over. Right. So now I'm just I'm ranting. But I want to hear from you. One is just is just why? Why don't more lawmakers understand technology? Why don't they understand the companies who are creating and commercializing these these tools, these platforms? Like, why? Why is this happening? Because I don't want to be so simplistic as to just say, like, it's an age thing.

14:03I don't think it's an age thing. I agree. You can understand technology no matter how old or young you are. A hundred percent. You can understand it no matter how old you are and you can not understand it even if you're young. You can choose not to understand it. What gives? Absolutely. I mean, we have a Congress that is dominated by lawyers and I love my friends who are lawyers, but you want to have a diversity of backgrounds in office. And maybe the skill set of software engineers and the skill set of Congress has less overlap than the skill set of lawyers in Congress. And so you need people that play in a few different arenas.

14:35But it's also something that's new and moving fast. You know, we alluded to it, but while I was working, I got a master's in computer science with a specialization in machine learning. So when I was elected in 2022, I became the first Democrat elected in New York at any level with a degree in computer science. Wow. I will be only the second Democrat in Congress with a degree in computer science. There are two Republicans who are there, but out of 435 members. Yeah, I mean, that is shocking. It feels like having less than 1 % of your congressional representatives for something moving so fast and so important is probably not the right balance.

15:11And just sort of an unfathomably powerful industry. I put the tech industry right up there next to government in terms of who's setting the agenda. I want to talk to you about AI. We're going to talk a lot about AI. I want to talk about regulation. So several states in the United States have stepped in with their own laws, including in New York. You spearheaded the RAISE Act, right? So that stands for Responsible AI Safety and Education. In a nutshell, it requires major AI developers to publish safety testing practices. Can you explain to our listeners and to me, how exactly does that work? What exactly does that mean AI developers are beholden to do and why is that important?

15:50Why did you decide to focus there? So this applies only to the very largest AI developers. They have to have a certain complexity threshold of the models and a revenue threshold. They need to be making$500 million a year in revenue. At this point, we're talking about OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. They seem like important ones to be paying attention to. They seem pretty big. They seem pretty big. And what it requires is that they have a safety plan that they make public and actually stick to. So you can amend it over time, but you have to amend it before you change your practices. You don't get to just ignore your safety plan and then come back and say, oh, wait, there's an amendment to that.

16:26They have to disclose critical safety incidents to the government. And that's specifically defined in the bill and is an incredibly high threshold. It requires either having caused an injury or death or will imminently cause an injury or death. That is the standard that has to be reported. And it also sets up a government agency within New York to continue to collect data on the development of AI to suggest additional rules and regulations and to annually report to the state legislature on changes in law that they think are needed in order to make everyone safer. I am so curious and I have so many questions and so much sort of consternation about what we are seeing play out at a state level with something like the Rays Act and then what we are seeing play out federally.

17:13Right. So President Trump signed an executive order last year that essentially created a task force to go after states that pass laws that aren't consistent with national policy around AI. I'm curious for how you would describe our national policy around AI. I would describe it as non-existent. I mean, there is no regulation happening in any meaningful capacity at a federal level. It is like all gas, no brakes, go for it, guys. Let's all have fun. It's terrifying. How does that executive order sort of intersect with what you're trying to do in New York? His executive order was directly targeting my research.

17:50Oh, fun. Mine and other bills like it throughout the country, SB 53. But it was very much designed to convince New York and California. And last year there were about seven states that were working on frontier AI models to not pass those laws, to not implement them. And so they just tried to punish states. It was if you pass a bill that does something we don't like, we're going to take away this specific funding. Bede funding is what they were often pointing at, which is to expand broadband access. Well, that's a classy threat. Yeah, yeah. It's hurt people in rural areas that don't have access to the Internet in order to.

18:26And they talked about finding other funding, vague other funding that they want to take away and instructed the attorney general to start suing states, which it's the first time I've heard someone make the argument that more lawsuits will lead to more innovation. But that was their path forward. It wasn't based on any serious policy. It was a few Trump megadonors that think that there should be no regulation of AI whatsoever getting him to give them a gift. And it's those same Trump megadonors that are now funding Leading the Future and these super PACs coming after me. Right. And let's talk about those ads.

19:05So they popped up just around the time that Ray's was signed into law. And these are, I mean, millions and millions and millions of dollars being spent to prevent candidates like you from getting into higher office. I grew up in Canada, so I have to admit it is always shocking to me when I watch political advertising in the U.S. I've lived here for almost 20 years, but the ads are so mean. Like, your politics here are nasty. Like, I've got, like, Mark Carney up there and, like, Justin Trudeau, you know, politely trading barbs. We do not have this kind of political mudslinging, I mean, is a word you used earlier.

19:42What was your reaction when you first saw those ads? That they're desperate. That they're making clear that, A, they know they're on the unpopular side of the issue. Because they're not directly addressing the issue. B, that I scare them. That they're willing to put, they've already spent$2.5 million. They originally pledged they were going to spend more than$10 million. And then they realized that that was helping me, that they had said that. And so now they're like, oh, we're adjusting our strategy. We might spend less. Okay. But yeah, they pledged to spend$10 million against me. And they put out these just hyperbolic, ridiculous ads because they realized that I am their greatest threat for their quest for unbridled control over the American worker, over our education system, over the climate.

20:36I mean, they were making clear to everyone else the stakes of the race. I literally just came from a call with a tenant leader who was about housing policy. It had nothing to do with AI. But this leader said, you know, I started paying attention to your campaign because of all these negative mailers. This is the best part. This is the funniest part because I have thought to myself, I mean, we've covered you at Wired twice. I think our sibling brand at Condé Nast Vanity Fair did a great piece about you. How much to you has this been a gift? They've been wonderful partners in raising up the issue.

21:10of AI regulation and AI safety. And my plan coming into this race was to talk about tech and AI five, 10 percent of my time, because if that's what you care about, you're already voting for me. So let me talk to you about health care and my housing policy and transportation and all these other things. But they have made clear that this is a big, evolving issue. And so a lot more voters are paying attention to it. But it's certainly not fun. I am also a voter in the district, So I am on their list. I get their text messages every day about the scary Alex Boris. You get nasty text messages about yourself.

21:42I do. I do. I get mailers sent to me. And then, you know, I don't want to throw it out. I need to know what people are saying about me. So I'll go to my mailbox in my lobby and I'll take out the mailer. And then I'll ride up in my elevator with my neighbors holding this mailer saying awful things about me. And it's a surreal moment. Next level self-harm. This is why politics, I just, I could never. I can't handle, you know, I can close, you know, X if someone's saying mean things about me on social media. I don't get physical mail. And to anyone listening, I don't want any. Please do not send me any mean mail.

22:16I can't take it. But this is part of their strategy is to defeat me. And they have to defeat me for the strategy to work, right? If I win, it undercuts their threats to everyone else. But also part of their strategy is just to intimidate everyone else. So the ways it's making it harder is maybe less about my race in particular, but talking to other members of the New York congressional delegation, talking to Congress members elsewhere who are watching this race. And I hope don't get cold feet. And the super PAC very much does hope that, you know, they'll just take a beat on this. Oh, this seems hot.

22:52This seems risky. Maybe let's let's let someone else take the lead on that. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back. This show is supported by CleanMyMac. CleanMyMac helps you clear space, reduce background strain, and maintain steady performance without constant interruptions. It's not about cleaning files or fixing machines. It's about removing the friction that breaks momentum. CleanMyMac is the quiet presence that keeps creativity uninterrupted so that when you're finishing a pitch deck at midnight or exporting a large final product, you can trust your Mac to keep up. Experience all the app's optimization essentials in a sleek, user-friendly dashboard.

23:31Get tidy today. Try 7 Days Free and use my code VALLEY for 20 % off. Taking care of your eyes shouldn't be a hassle. That's why Warby Parker is a one-stop shop for all your vision needs. Our prescription glasses and sunglasses are expertly crafted and unexpectedly affordable. Stop by a nearby store or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. Did we mention we offer eye exams and take vision insurance too? For everything you need to see, head to your nearest Warby Parker store or visit WarbyParker.com today. That's WarbyParker.com. Everybody has a hot take on the economy.

24:11And whether you're curious about inflation, trade wars, or the markets, what you need is reporting you can trust. Hi, I'm Kai Rizdahl, the host of Marketplace. Our award-winning reporters talk to everybody from CEOs to farmers to help you understand how the economy takes shape in the real world. You'll be smarter every time you listen. And these days, that's priceless. Listen to Marketplace on your favorite podcast app.

24:44In terms of AI regulation, what do you want to see? I put out a AI framework about two months ago that had eight subject areas, 43 sub points. I know Democrats in our plans and but. Yes, many bullet points. But I thought it was important to communicate exactly what I wanted to do. And it covered everything from age verification for certain uses for kids to a broad data privacy bill, which we're 20 years behind on, but now have to deal with the fact that AI can de-anonymize previously anonymized data to regulation around the labor force to catastrophic risks to specific technical standards we could use to defeat the problem of deepfakes.