OPINION: Leadership and the AI Arms Race

By John Deaton,

Candidate for US Senate

As the United States races against China for dominance in artificial intelligence, a technology that will define the next century of economic and military power, Massachusetts still doesn’t have a senator who can explain what it is.

Asked directly on a debate stage whether he uses AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, Senator Ed Markey told voters he uses “whatever is inside of my iPhone and my iPad.”

Pressed further, he admitted he doesn’t even know which companies power the tools on his own devices.

This isn’t a gotcha moment. It’s a preview of how the next six years would go.

The AI arms race won’t wait for anyone to catch up. While Washington debates whether to regulate model training, export controls, and data-center buildout, China is moving. The senators writing this generation’s AI policy need to understand compute, chips, and capital formation—not just talking points handed to them after the fact.

And that’s the deeper problem in Massachusetts. Too often, Senator Markey looks less like an independent leader and more like a chorus waiting for his cues—from Elizabeth Warren, Ayanna Pressley, or Bernie Sanders.

On an issue moving as fast as AI, that’s not just unimpressive. It’s dangerous. You cannot regulate a technology you don’t understand, and you cannot lead on a technology you’re waiting for permission to have an opinion on.

Massachusetts built the arsenal of democracy in the last century. We have the universities, the research labs, and the engineers to lead this one too. What we don’t have is a delegation with the technical fluency—or the independence—to get out in front of it.

We need leaders who understand AI well enough to write real policy: protecting ratepayers as data centers strain the grid, keeping American AI development ahead of Beijing, and making sure the rules are written by people who understand the technology, not by whoever’s iPad happens to have an opinion.