A Palantir cofounder is backing a group attacking Alex Bores over his work with . . . Palantir

For the past few weeks, political ads attacking Alex Bores have been running in New York’s 12th Congressional District. The ads are funded by a pro-AI political action committee that supports the expansion of artificial intelligence, yet they aim to weaken Bores’s candidacy by tying him to his past work in tech. They accuse Bores, who has recently called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), of hypocrisy because he previously worked at Palantir, a data analytics company whose contracts with ICE have made it a frequent target of activists.

The ads allege that Bores made hundreds of thousands of dollars building and selling technology for the agency. “Now he’s running from his past, while ICE is in our communities,” one ad warns. “ICE is powered by Bores’s tech . . . he should never, ever be in Congress.”

Inside Palantir, the ads are starting to irk some employees. Two current employees and three former employees tell Fast Company that they view the campaign as opportunistic. Some believe the ads misrepresent Bores’s record at the company. Others say Palantir’s approach to its work with ICE has changed since Bores left the company many years ago.

Several employees said they see the ads as less about immigration enforcement and more about politics within the tech industry. They point to the PAC funding the campaign, Leading the Future, as evidence that the effort is primarily about countering Bores’s support for AI regulation. That view is shared by one former Biden administration staffer who, speaking on condition of anonymity, emphasized that the ad campaign was “almost certainly” a response to Bores’s role as a lead sponsor of an AI safety bill in New York.

“If Bores’s campaign is one that would restrict the tech industry’s growth, and his base is one that is already primed to be critical of Palantir, people (like me!) who watch this ad wouldn’t suspect that it’s people with significant interests in Palantir and the broader industry that are funding the ads, too,” one former employee tells Fast Company in a message.

Bores, a member of the New York State Assembly who successfully pushed for AI regulation at the state level, is currently running for the Democratic nomination for New York’s 12th Congressional District. The district represents the very liberal and very wealthy neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Upper West and Upper East Sides, meaning the winner of the Democratic primary is all but guaranteed to win the general election.

Bores has leaned into his tech background on the campaign trail. He says he is proud of his work at Palantir but left the company seven years ago in response to its work for ICE, a project he says he never worked on or participated in. Since then, however, he has been the subject of an extended ad campaign branding him an “expert in hypocrisy” and alleging that he profited from Palantir’s work with the Department of Homeland Security.

The ads seek to capitalize on widespread anger over ICE, particularly following a massive escalation of raids and deportations and the killing of two American citizens. Bores’s campaign has since sent Leading the Future a cease-and-desist, Semafor recently reported.

Joe Lonsdale’s role in the anti-Bores effort

The ads are being released by Think Big, a group that describes itself as supporting pro-AI Democratic leaders. Think Big is funded by the Super PAC Leading the Future, according to Federal Election Commission documents.

Leading the Future’s founding supporters, according to its own press release, include Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and the AI company Perplexity. Multiple donors associated with the group—such as Lonsdale and Andreessen—have also been major contributors to Republican candidates and causes. Campaign finance records show that Lonsdale Enterprises is the only donor, aside from Leading the Future itself, listed on filings associated with American Mission, a separate PAC affiliated with the same network. (Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited sums but are prohibited from donating directly to candidates. Traditional PACs face strict contribution limits but are allowed to donate to campaigns, leading many political networks to operate both.)

“The co-founder of Palantir started a Super PAC that is lying to New Yorkers about my work and the fact that I quit seven years ago over the ICE contract they continue to profit off of to this day,” Bores tells Fast Company.

The real issue, Bores argues, is his work on AI regulation. He co-sponsored a New York state law known as the Raise Act, which was signed last year by Governor Kathy Hochul and imposes safety requirements on frontier AI developers. He has said he plans to pursue similar legislation in Congress.

John Vlasto, a leader at Leading the Future, said in an emailed statement: “Leading the Future will aggressively oppose policymakers and candidates in states across the country who play political games with the future of American leadership and jeopardize American workers, families, and communities ability to benefit from AI innovation and growth.” Palantir did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.

Now Palantir employees are grappling with the growing public scrutiny of the company’s work with ICE and the way that criticism is being deployed politically. One current employee said Bores was always upfront internally about his background and found it jarring that a PAC backed by tech funders would attack someone for having worked in the technology industry.

Another current employee said the ads and campaign materials highlighting Palantir’s ICE contracts feel disingenuous, adding that the work remains controversial inside the company. (Indeed, Wired reported on Tuesday that Palantir employees have spent weeks pressing company leadership for answers about its work with ICE, prompting CEO Alex Karp to address the issue in a prerecorded internal video.) That tension has fueled anger among some employees that Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder, appears to be amplifying criticism of the company based on its federal contracts. There’s even a Slack thread where people have flagged the ads and other campaign materials they’ve received, one employee tells Fast Company.

“Nothing says ‘principled stance’ like a founder denouncing their own company’s employees for their own company’s choices,” Varoon Mathur, who worked on AI at the Biden White House, tells Fast Company. Another former Biden administration official similarly emphasized that the campaign was almost “certainly because” Bores sponsored AI safety legislation in New York.

Controversy over ICE and Palantir

The ads targeting Bores come amid growing criticism of Palantir’s work with ICE. The company has worked with the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, but its current relationship with the federal government primarily centers on ICE.

That work includes a product called ImmigrationOS, which assists the agency with deportation operations, as well as support for an ICE tip line that was recently disclosed in the agency’s AI inventory. Work on the tip line began years ago but was shifted to Palantir during the second Trump administration, a former DHS employee tells Fast Company. (Palantir has also faced criticism for its contracts with the Israeli military during the war in Gaza.)

The company’s growing political baggage has made it a liability for some elected officials. In New York City, finance officials are pressing for an inquiry into the city’s pension fund, which is invested in Palantir. In Colorado, Sen. John Hickenlooper and Rep. Jason Crow announced this week that they would offset campaign contributions from current and former Palantir employees by donating to immigrant rights groups. In Florida, far-right candidate James Fishback has called for banning the company from the state.

For Bores, that scrutiny has extended to his own tenure at Palantir. He previously told Fast Company that he left the company when, “or soon after,” Palantir renewed an ICE contract that expanded the scope of its work with the Department of Homeland Security. However, City & State reported last month that Bores remained at Palantir after controversy over the ICE contract first emerged. (Bores’s spokesperson told the outlet that he left before the contract was renewed, and he believed the contract’s renewal was likely.)

Two Palantir employees who spoke to Fast Company said they had no reason to believe Bores worked on the ICE contract specifically, and one said they remembered him opposing the company’s work with ICE internally. Some Palantir employees have also donated to his campaign, Bores has said.

Current and former employees describe a company long divided over its government contracts, particularly those tied to immigration enforcement. One former employee said the ads were frustrating but predictable, given Palantir’s history of pursuing government work across administrations. Another said they left the company after its approach to ICE shifted away from earlier guardrails, adding that the advertisements felt like retribution. A third former employee recalled internal conversations that “look pretty different from at least what I’m seeing publicly about Palantir now.”

Bores, for his part, has tried to turn the PAC’s focus on him into a political asset, framing it as validation of his push for AI regulation. “Judge me by my enemies,” he wrote in a recent tweet, referring directly to Lonsdale.