Sam Lyman, the head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and the author of the report, said that he first started looking into the issue following a public AI safety conversation in April between Senator Bernie Sanders and four experts, including two from China, about the need for international cooperation.
“It was such an obvious psyop,” he says of the event.
However, experts on China and AI who spoke to WIRED were skeptical of the report’s claims that Beijing is directly and intentionally involved in the US data center discourse. Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out that high-level discussions between US and Chinese officials and experts have happened at other points in the recent past around similarly pressing global issues, like climate change. (Xue Lan, one of the speakers at the Sanders event singled out by the report, is a nonresident fellow at Brookings.)
“If you’re looking for prominent people from China who can speak about [AI], they are going to be the very people who would be in contact with and providing advice to the Chinese government—especially in academia, where there’s a lot of back and forth between academic experts and advising the government on policymaking,” Chan says. “The framing of it can certainly sound ominous, but almost by definition, you would want people who matter in the Chinese AI debate to be there.”
Graham Webster, a research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, says that the report calls out actions and signs that don’t match other documented cases of known Chinese influence campaigns, especially when it comes to coverage in state media like China Daily, an English-language newspaper.
“You see US media covering these types of data center discourses,” he says. “It’s totally normal for the English-language Chinese media to pick up storylines that are in the US media. It’s just how wire services work.”
Both Chan and Webster stressed that there have been instances in the past of Chinese actors intentionally amplifying other social issues organically causing unrest in the US—protests around the genocide in Gaza, for instance. Similarly, Lyman of the Bitcoin Policy Institute acknowledges that local communities “have legitimate questions and concerns” about AI and data center development.
Even if much of the opposition in the US began organically, there’s a strong chance that foreign actors could intervene sooner rather than later.
“The targeting of OpenAI and US data center buildouts is significant not because the operation appears to have shifted public opinion, but because it shows PRC-origin influence operators testing narratives against AI infrastructure,” the OpenAI report notes.
Chan, of the Brookings Institution, says that the OpenAI report is “part of a broader pattern of Chinese state media and connected actors amplifying legitimate social grievances in the US to make the US look bad.
“I’d be cautious in estimating the impact of these efforts before seeing more evidence, but it is something worth tracking,” he says.
