NEW YORK, NEW YORK. Who Decides, a new $30 million political effort, is launching today to answer the question at the center of a defining issue of our time: Who gets to decide how AI changes American life? Right now, a few executives inside a handful of companies are making all the decisions as AI reshapes entire industries, education, communities, and safety, and as the most powerful models grow beyond our ability to control them. The public has virtually no say, and neither political party has staked out a comprehensive agenda. Who Decides exists to make sure Democrats do, by building the coalitions needed to win elections on AI safety and govern AI so that the public sets the rules for the technology.
Who Decides is Alex Bores and Anna Myers’ next act, building directly on the platform Bores’ primary run created and their experiences passing the toughest AI safety law in the country. The organization will work with the institutions between voters and elected officials: labor unions and organizations representing parents, educators, civil rights, faith communities, seniors, consumers, and local communities. These are organizations Democratic voters already trust and that Democratic candidates listen to. For millions of people, these organizations are the vehicle by which concerns about jobs, families, rights, faith, or their community become political action. While their members have concerns about AI, many of these organizations are just starting to develop an AI agenda. A fragmented approach from these varied groups creates an all-too-familiar problem of party infighting and inertia.
Who Decides will target the states that will decide the 2028 primary and general elections and partner with national and local organizations to build an AI agenda each can own. Through its engagement with candidates, Who Decides will establish a common standard on AI safety that every serious Democrat is expected to meet.
Who Decides’ goal is that by 2028, Democratic candidates from the top of the ticket on down run with a common AI safety agenda. 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. A $30 million effort, Who Decides will invest strategically to ensure that the next Democratic president will take office and be ready to move on this AI agenda in the first hundred days. Who Decides will not accept corporate money or contributions from senior executives at frontier AI companies.
“People feel as though AI is happening to them, not for them,” said Bores. “They can see it in the tools pushed on their kids in school and online, in their workplaces, and in the frightening and overwhelming news stories about AI evading human control. They can see that a handful of executives are making the decisions about all of this without them. And in all these instances, elected leaders need to understand that anger is about power: who has it, who doesn’t, who profits, and who is left with the consequences. We don’t let five people write the laws for hundreds of millions of Americans. There is no reason to let them write the rules for AI.”
Who Decides grew out of two fights Bores and Myers have already waged over who gets to write the rules on AI. First, Bores authored and passed New York’s RAISE Act, the strongest AI bill in the country, which requires the largest frontier AI developers to publish safety plans and report critical safety incidents. The RAISE Act passed despite millions in industry lobbying and fierce opposition from leading tech companies. That’s because of the coalition Bores and Myers brought together to back the bill, a coalition that included over 70 organizations, from labor unions and advocacy groups to over a dozen startups and more than 30 AI researchers. The bill is a floor for AI legislation moving forward, and a testament to the untapped potential for building political power around AI safety.
Then Bores ran for Congress in New York’s 12th District on a promise to regulate the AI industry and give people a say in the technology’s development. In doing so, he made the right enemies, with an industry-funded super PAC spending roughly $10 million to take him down. He lost narrowly, but the race revealed both how much force the AI industry is prepared to bring to politics and the political opening for candidates willing to challenge it. Since then, legislators from all over the country have turned to Bores for advice, seeing the urgency and importance of AI as a political issue.
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. 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.
Bores and Myers built Who Decides from the same combination of policy, political, and coalition work that carried the RAISE Act and built the support behind Bores’ campaign for Congress. Bores brings a computer scientist’s understanding of the technology and a legislator’s experience turning safety principles into law. Myers, Who Decides’ Co-Founder and Executive Director, has spent more than a decade building the coalitions and operations behind organizations, companies, and campaigns. As Bores’ Chief of Staff in the New York State Assembly, she held the RAISE coalition together through difficult negotiations, and as Senior Advisor she directed operations for his congressional campaign. Both will work across policy, politics, partnerships, and organizing.
“When we were working to pass the RAISE Act, we engaged unions, advocacy groups, and AI safety researchers,” said Myers. “We were able to communicate with them the importance of what one another needed in the bill and why. Everyone was aligned on one thing: the same aggressive, multi-front effort from the AI industry that attacks everyone’s AI priorities was coming for this bill, and we had to build a new type of coalition to beat it. That work continues nationwide, and we know how to do it: you sit down with people, you listen to them and take what they’re worried about seriously, and you help them build something they can all own, all toward a common goal of safety and giving people a say in this technology.”
Who Decides will begin with the organizations that constitute the foundation of Democratic politics. In its first year, Who Decides will:
- Build a network of organizers to work with national partners and local groups in 11 early-primary and battleground states: South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
- Hold convening and listening sessions in every target state, then work directly with partner organizations as they stake out positions on frontier models, AI’s impact on jobs, kids, and safety, and other concerns their members raise, helping each build an AI agenda that makes sense for them.
- Conduct quarterly state and national polls. The research will examine what is driving concerns about AI and what people want elected officials to do about it.
- Convene national gatherings twice a year to bring labor, parents, educators, faith leaders, civil-rights groups, and local officials into the same room. Each meeting will end with decisions on common ground around AI safety, who is responsible for what, and what should happen next.
- Partner with organizations to put those priorities in front of candidates via questionnaires, forums, endorsements, briefings, policy demands, and governing agendas.
Who Decides will also serve as an on-call resource as new questions and issues come up, so partners don’t have to start from scratch each time the technology changes or a new issue or battle emerges.
“During the campaign, we kept hearing the whole range of concerns about AI,” Myers said. “Labor unions fighting for their members’ jobs and benefits, parents worried about their children, civil-rights organizations confronting discrimination, and people who had never supported a political campaign in their life worried about AI systems we can’t control. These are all entry points into the same AI safety debate. If Democrats connect them, they can answer, and win elections on, the question at the heart of all of it: Who decides, and who carries the consequences?”
Industry is already organizing on this ground, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby state governments and the White House, form PACs, gather voter data, and circulate candidate questionnaires before races begin. Democrats now face a choice: organize the public’s concern while the questions are still open, or enter 2028 responding to terms the industry has already set. If trusted organizations move together now, candidates can run on commitments rooted in what Americans are asking for and take office with a real governing agenda rather than just popular talking points.
“There isn’t time to wait for the politics to sort themselves out,” Bores said. “If Democratic stakeholders and these trusted organizations move separately, industry can co-opt or drown them out one by one. The question in our name is the whole ballgame. Somebody is going to decide how this technology gets built and who it serves. We think it should be the public, and we think Democrats must be the party that says so.”