PRIORITIES • Protect Our Future • Policy to

Make Big Tech Build Responsibly

Why I believe this — and how I’ll fight for it.

Artificial intelligence is going to reshape every part of our lives, whether we’re ready or not. It’s here, and the rest of the world is racing ahead. Standing still isn’t an option. What matters now is that we regulate it, standardize it, build it responsibly, and protect people while we do. And that takes leaders who actually understand the technology. The people writing the rules don’t. I do — I’ve spent my career building businesses in healthcare, education, and technology, and I understand how this works down to the details. You cannot write smart rules for something you don’t understand, and we cannot afford to get this one wrong.

People are right to be afraid of this. The technology is already coming for jobs — not shipping them overseas this time, but automating them away — and for a lot of families, that’s frightening. It can also hand a few companies more power and wealth than any group in history has ever held, while the rest of us get higher bills, drained water, and less control over our own lives. The question was never whether AI is coming. It’s whether it’s built to serve the people, or the few who own it.

So my position is simple, and it starts with getting ahead of this instead of chasing it: regulate it, standardize it, build it responsibly, and protect our people, our planet, and our economy every step of the way. And let me say plainly what the tech giants won’t — the real danger here is no regulation at all. Leave the most powerful technology in history to a handful of companies with no rules and no referees, and we hand them a grip on our economy, our information, and our government that no one voted to give them. We have to get ahead of it: get the money out of politics, put people who understand the technology in the room, and make AI work for all of us instead of a chosen few.

Here’s what I’ll do — and why

Protect the workers this technology is about to displace. Let’s be honest, because no one in Washington will: AI is going to take jobs — real jobs, held by real people in this district. We made a catastrophic mistake a generation ago, when we let globalization ship our work overseas and told the families left behind they were on their own. Whole communities never recovered. I will not let that happen again with automation. I’ll fight to protect American jobs, to give workers real notice and a real say before a machine takes their place, and to tax the AI workloads and the corporations profiting most from automation — using that money to fund union-powered training and real pathways into the new work AI creates. If this technology is going to make a few people unimaginably rich by replacing your job, the least we owe you is a way forward, not another decade of being left behind. The gains have to be shared, or none of this is worth it.

Keep Big Tech’s data centers from raising your bills and draining your water — starting with a moratorium in California. AI runs on massive data centers, and they’re gulping electricity and water at a staggering rate — the worst of them burn through a whole city’s worth of water in a year — while sticking you with higher utility bills to power them. That’s Big Tech offloading its costs onto you. I’ll fight for a moratorium on new data centers in California, so we stop letting them strain our grid, drain our water, and drive up your bills. Any new data centers in the US must pay to generate their own clean, on-site power and meet strict water standards — so they never come out of your pocket or our rivers.

Make Big Tech pay its fair share. Some of the richest companies in human history pay little or nothing in federal taxes — Amazon paid zero as recently as 2018. They make billions off our data, our infrastructure, and our attention, then dodge the bill everyone else pays. I’ll fight to close the loopholes and make Big Tech pay what it owes — the same as the nurse, the teacher, and the small business down the street.

Protect your privacy — and give you ownership of your own data. Right now Big Tech harvests your life — where you go, what you say, what you buy — and sells it, and you get nothing. Your data is yours. I’ll fight for a real federal privacy law and an AI Bill of Rights that give you ownership and control of your own information, so it can’t be taken, sold, or used against you without your say.

Don’t let a few own it all — and buy the government too. The greatest danger isn’t the technology itself. It’s what happens when a handful of companies own it — because that kind of wealth and power doesn’t just corner a market, it buys a government. The richer these companies get, the more politicians they can buy, and the harder it becomes to ever hold them to a rule. That’s the trap. I’ll fight for real antitrust enforcement so no one can corner the foundational models and mint the world’s first trillionaires, and I’ll keep the rules from simply entrenching the giants — protecting open, competitive development so this technology is built by the many, not the few. We can only regulate Big Tech properly if we get the corporate money out of politics first. As long as they can buy the referees, they’ll never play by the rules. This fight and the fight to end corruption are the same fight.

What this means for Our District

This isn’t someone else’s problem — it lands right here. The data centers AI runs on want our land, our power, and our water — the very water our farms and families are already fighting to hold onto — and they’d pave our farmland for server farms if we let them. The automation coming with it threatens the jobs this district runs on. And the same Big Tech giants dodging their taxes are the ones squeezing out the small businesses on our Main Streets. Protecting this district means protecting our farmland from being turned into server farms, our water from being drained to cool them, the jobs our families depend on, and the small businesses that make our towns what they are.

And here’s why we don’t have that protection now: our own congressman takes Big Tech’s money — Amazon’s and Google’s corporate PACs, and Apple’s own lobbyist — and a top Silicon Valley tech financier and his family maxed out to his campaign. I take none of it: no corporate PAC money, not a dollar. After nearly 30 years in Washington, he’s not the one to write the rules for a technology moving this fast — you can’t regulate what you don’t understand. This district needs a representative who understands the tools about to reshape our lives, and who answers to the families they’ll affect, not the companies building them.

The bottom line

This is the fight for who controls the future. AI is here, and it’s going to be more powerful than anything we’ve seen — the only question is whether it serves the people or the few who own it. We can regulate it, build it responsibly, protect your job, your bills, your water, and your privacy, and keep it from being owned and weaponized by a handful of companies. But we’ll only get it right if we get the money out of politics and put people who understand the technology in the room. That’s what I’m running to do — make sure the most powerful technology in history works for all of us, not just the few.

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