Three months after the Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek upended the tech world with a model that rivaled America’s best, a 28-year-old AI executive named Alexandr Wang came to Capitol Hill to tell policymakers what they needed to do to maintain U.S. dominance.

The U.S. needs to establish a "national AI data reserve,” supply enough power for data centers and avoid an onerous patchwork of state-level rules, Wang said at the April hearing. Lawmakers welcomed his feedback. "It’s good to see you again here in Washington,” Republican Representative Neal Dunn of Florida said. "You’re becoming a regular up here.”

Wang, the chief executive officer of Scale AI, may not be a household name in the same way OpenAI’s Sam Altman has become. But he and his company have gained significant influence in tech and policy circles in recent years.