China Didn’t Make Americans Hate Data Warehouses

Sam Lyman, director of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and the author of the report, said that he first started looking at the issue following the public AI security discussion in April between Senator Bernie Sanders and four experts, including two from China, about the need for international cooperation.

“It was an obvious psyop,” he says of the incident.

However, China and AI experts who spoke to WIRED questioned the report’s claims that Beijing is directly and intentionally involved in the US data center issue. Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out that high-level discussions between US and Chinese officials and experts have sometimes occurred recently on international issues, such as. global warming. (Xue Lan, one of the speakers at the Sanders event cited by the report, is a non-Brookings resident.)

“If you’re looking for famous people from China who can talk about (AI), they will be people who can collaborate and give advice to the Chinese government—especially in academia, where there is a lot of overlap between academics and advising the government on policy,” says Chan. “The design of it may seem scary, but by definition, you would want people who are important to the Chinese AI debate to be there.”

Graham Webster, a researcher at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, says the report cites actions and signs that are not consistent with other known cases of Chinese influence, especially in the case of state media such as the China Daily, an English-language newspaper.

“You see the US media covering these kinds of issues,” he says. “It’s not uncommon for English-speaking Chinese journalists to be able to access news on US radio. That’s how the wires work.”

Both Chan and Webster emphasized that there have been instances in the past in which Chinese actors have deliberately exacerbated certain issues that cause unrest in the US – protests related to the massacre in Gaza, for example. Similarly, Lyman of the Bitcoin Policy Institute acknowledges that the community has “legitimate questions and concerns” about AI and data development.

While most of the protests in the US started organically, there is a chance that foreign players will soon intervene.

“The focus on OpenAI and US data center buildouts is important not because the project seems to have changed public opinion, but because it shows that the PRC-based lobbying operators are testing anti-AI issues,” the OpenAI report says.

Chan, of the Brookings Institution, says the OpenAI report is “part of a conspiracy by Chinese media and lobbyists who are expanding legitimate claims against the US to make the US look bad.”

He said: “I would have been cautious considering the results of this effort before I saw much evidence, but it is something worth pursuing.”