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US Rep. Stephen Lynch, fresh off an 11-point primary election win over attorney Patrick Roath on Sept. 1, is looking beyond his own reelection campaign to the larger fight for control of Congress in November and the urgent need to regulate what he sees as a mounting and “terrifying” risk of AI-organized attacks around the globe.
In a sit-down interview with The Reporter this week at The Sugar Bowl on Dorchester Avenue, the South Boston Democrat said he plans to campaign in other states ahead of the Nov. 3 general election in hopes of reclaiming Democrat control of the US House and Senate. The stakes, he says, could not be higher, particularly when it comes to the war in Iran and the AI-threat.
Congressman Lynch, left, during an interview today at the Sugar Bowl in Dorchester. John Forry photo
Lynch, 71, the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services subcommittee that deals with digital assets, financial technology, and artificial intelligence, has been focused on AI policy for several years.
“It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying,” Lynch said. “We’re creating a weapon here, and we don’t have control over it. So it could harm us.”
He added: “We also have an alignment problem, which is related to that. The preferences for this artificial intelligence, especially any version of a super intelligence, doesn’t have the same preferences and the same priorities that the human species has. So it puts us at great risk.”
Since the current president has minimized the AI threat — and even called it “a hoax”—Lynch says that AI oversight needs to be a top priority for Democrats if they take control of the House. That, along with the economic pressures that Lynch says are driving the national pushback to the Trump administration, gives Democrats a real chance to reclaim both branches of Congress in the next month.
“It’ll be close,” Lynch said. “I do believe we could end up with a margin of more than 10 votes in the House.”
But, even with a Democratic majority, he said, “you’ve got some moderates that you’re electing, so you can’t rely on all those votes. You’ve got some conservatives that you’re electing, so you can’t count on those votes.”
Lynch is organizing groups of supporters, including union members, to campaign in competitive districts in two specific races: New York’s 17th Congressional District, where Democrat Cait Conley is challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Mike Lawler. He also plans to travel to Ohio to stump for Brian Poindexter, a former union ironworker like Lynch, who is challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Max Miller.
“Those are both sort of working-class areas where a former ironworker could probably convince some people,” said Lynch.
Primary win proved a point
Lynch himself still faces two opponents in November. Republican nominee Robert Burke and independent candidate Rasheed Nicholas Walters will both be on the Nov. 3 general election ballot. But, realistically, his toughest opponent this cycle came from the left wing of his own party in the person of Patrick Roath, an attorney and former Obama White House staffer who presented Lynch with his most serious electoral challenge since he won an open seat to succeed the late Congressman Joe Moakley in 2001.
Lynch won, with 57,823 votes to Roath’s 45,946, according to state election results, but Roath carried Boston along with two towns in the Eighth Congressional District: Hingham, and Westwood. Lynch won on the strength of his performance elsewhere, including parts of Dorchester and Southie, along with Brockton, Quincy, Weymouth, Milton, and Braintree.
“I have 18 towns, so I try to treat that as a district, and then I have three cities,” Lynch said in an interview with The Reporter last week. “We won 16 of the 18 towns. And then I won two out of the three cities.”
Above, Congressman Lynch spoke to the Columbia-Savin Hill Civic Association in June. Gage Vieno photo
Roath and outside groups— including Political Action Committees affiliated with progressive interests like David Hogg — sought to portray Lynch as too moderate for the Democratic primary voters.
“You just hope … people know you better than that, and so they rejected that,” Lynch said. “But the new people probably didn’t reject that. There were some people, no doubt, that [thought] that was true… I don’t know if it’s [because] it’s the age of Trump, but they can just totally lie about things. You don’t have the capacity to knock down every single allegation. It’s just the way it is now. It’s frustrating.”
Lynch seemed particularly peeved about mailers that portrayed him as hostile to immigrants or pro-ICE, the rouge federal agency that has killed American citizens without penalty and that has bucked Congressional attempts at oversight and reform, including one led by Lynch himself.
“I’m a co-sponsor of the reform act that would require every single ICE agent to wear a body camera,” Lynch noted. “They would have to take the mask off. They would have to be vetted and go through a process.”
Lynch said Tuesday: “There needs to be a whole new reengineering of ICE and what they’re about. Look, I was in Congress when they created the Department of Homeland Security, and we were worried about the border. We were worried about somebody bringing in a dirty bomb or something like that. This was right after 9/11, right? And so we had a whole different vision of how we were going to deal with the border and border protection.”
“Now we have ICE operating in major cities — Chicago, New York, Boston. You know, this is not how this was originally intended…I don’t think, to be honest with you, we ever envisioned that a president would use it in this way. So there weren’t rules that would prohibit that.”
Lynch says Democrats have an opportunity “if we take the House and Senate back, to say, ‘Hey, you know, we can protect the border, but when we need policing in our major cities, we have our state and local authorities who are well equipped to do that, and let’s rely on them.’ They have a much better feel for the community than someone coming from, you know, the Texas border of Mexico, coming into our cities, having no sense of the community there.”
The war in Iran
Lynch says Democrats will also need to do what Republicans have refused to do, so far: Check the executive branch’s excesses in prosecuting an unauthorized and costly war against Iran that is now in its seventh month.
“You want to force the president back into a situation where he has to talk to Congress and get permission and authorization from Congress to wage war,” Lynch said. “He originally said it was two weeks — two weeks!
“They’re looking for $67 billion right now to sustain the military operations in the Middle East, generally, including, of course, our actions against Iran. What we hope to do, if we [are] able to take the House and Senate back, is push through a War Powers Resolution that would curtail our fire. The other opportunity would be on a general appropriation bill [that would] shut off funding for that operation.”
Despite serving on congressional committees that ordinarily would receive advance or early notification of military action, Lynch said that he and other members of Congress have been “kept in the dark. “
He added, “Normally, I hear about developments, or initial military operations against Iran, before other members of Congress. We heard nothing. I got a text from Truth Social, I think, on my phone at two o’clock in the morning in March. That’s how I found out, and most of the other members, Democrats and Republicans, found out about the military operations.”
“So this president has broken all the rules,” he said. “Unfortunately, our House colleagues and Senate colleagues are not willing to hold him accountable. A few of them have, but not many. They’re all afraid of the consequences that might visit them in their own seats, in their own districts, if they go up against the president.
“So that has to stop. We have to regain and reassert congressional power on this.”
Rep. Lynch during a committee hearing last year. C-Span image
Confronting AI’s threat
Due to his role as the ranking Democrat on a subcommittee focused on AI and crypto-currency, Lynch could well become one of the most visible national leaders on AI regulation in the next Congress. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who would likely be the next speaker of the House if there’s a blue wave next month, “has really been at my elbow in terms of my job being the ranking Democrat on AI,” Lynch said. “He really understands deeply the threat that’s here.”
He expects that Jeffries might create a select committee devoted specifically to artificial intelligence. “I’m just hoping that we will take this seriously before there’s a major loss of life,” he said.
Asked what such an event might look like, Lynch cited the possibility of disruptions to communications, satellites, GPS, emergency response systems, and ultimately, basic necessities.
“We would essentially go dark,” he said. “Food supply, water supply — all those are essential things that we require to sustain our communities.”
The technology, he said, is advancing much faster than any attempts at regulating it.
“I do give Anthropic and OpenAI credit for coming forward and saying, ‘We had a breach, you know, a breach of containment… We’re also fighting for some safety groups out there, AI safety groups that are identifying even more hacks, and more breaches, and more negative consequences that have resulted, because of that breach from containment.”
“That’s going to be job one,” Lynch said, “because of the urgency and the speed at which this AI is developing.”
Read part two of The Reporter’s interview with Congressman Lynch — coming later this week at DotNews.com.
Copyright © 2026 Boston Neighborhood News, Inc. This content may not be re-published or re-used without written permission.
