China didn’t make Americans hate data centers

Sam Lehman, head of research at the Bitcoin Policy Institute and author of the report, said he first began looking into the issue after a public conversation on AI safety in April between Senator Bernie Sanders and four experts, including two from China, about the need for international cooperation.

“It was a clear psychological situation,” 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 US data center rhetoric. Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out that high-level discussions between American and Chinese officials and experts have taken place at other points in the recent past on similar pressing global issues, such as climate change. (Xue Lan, one of the speakers at the Sanders event referenced in the report, is a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.)

“If you’re looking for notable people from China that you can talk about [AI]“They will be the same people who will be in contact with and advising the Chinese government — especially in academia, where there is a lot of back-and-forth between academic experts and advising the government on policy making,” Chan says. “Sure, the framing of that can sound ominous, but almost by definition, you would want people who are important to the Chinese AI debate.”

Graham Webster, a researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, says the report cites actions and signals that do not match other documented cases of well-known Chinese influence campaigns, especially when it comes to coverage in state media such as the China Daily, an English-language newspaper.

“You see the American media covering these kinds of data center rhetoric,” he says. “It is quite normal for English-language Chinese media to pick up storylines in American media. This is how news agencies work.”

Both Chan and Webster stressed that there have been cases in the past where Chinese actors deliberately amplified other social issues that organically caused unrest in the United States, such as protests over the genocide in Gaza, for example. Likewise, the Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Lehman acknowledges that local communities “have legitimate questions and concerns” about artificial intelligence and data center development.

Even if much of the opposition in the United States begins organically, there is a strong chance that foreign actors will intervene sooner rather than later.

“Targeting OpenAI and the US data center buildouts is significant not because the operation appears to have changed public opinion, but because it shows that PRC influence operators are testing narratives against AI infrastructure,” the OpenAI report notes.

The OpenAI report is “part of a broader pattern of Chinese state media and associated actors amplifying legitimate social injustices in the United States to make the United States look bad,” says Chan, of the Brookings Institution.

“I would be cautious in estimating the impact of these efforts before seeing more evidence, but it is something worth pursuing,” he says.