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America’s AI race against China, which has become a major point of debate as midterms approach, is a race filled with “coordinated” propaganda, warned Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
In recent months, data centers and AI policy have been debated in Congress and at the kitchen tables of American families. But Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told Digital that much of the new opposition to data centers is being manipulated by a well-funded and coordinated campaign.
“It’s the same reason we saw Middle Eastern countries paying for anti-fracking movements,” Cruz said. “Because if they can convince America, ‘Don’t develop your oil and gas, just buy it from us,’ well, that’s great for them and terrible for us. The same is true on data centers. If they can convince Americans, ‘You don’t want data centers here, you want to just rely on the Chinese for AI,’ that’s great for China, and it’s terrible for America.”
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC on Thursday May 8, 2025. The witnesses include CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, Chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) Lisa Su, Co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc Michael Intrator, and President of Microsoft Corp. Brad Smith. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
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Direct funding from the Chinese government into the U.S. on data center policies has not been revealed. However, in June, OpenAI announced it had banned ChatGPT accounts believed to have originated in China, and said that the accounts were generating social media comments and images alleging that data centers are raising electricity costs for Americans.
OpenAI said in a statement that it shut down “two clusters of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China that [OpenAI] banned after they used our models in support of apparent covert influence operations that promoted narratives in an attempt to manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and wider tech policies.”
Cruz called the effort to craft policy to ensure the U.S. wins the AI race is “the single most important economic question facing America today.”
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“If China wins, AI will be focused on espionage and propaganda and control and surveillance, because that’s the Chinese Communist Party,” Cruz said. “It will be their values. They will use AI to try to control you. If America wins, I want American values to be reflected in AI. I want free speech and individualism and free enterprise and privacy to be reflected in AI, not control and power.”
Cruz called opposition to AI advancement and data centers the “dominant position on the Democratic side.” The third-term Republican said the Democrats’ position is aligned with that of big industry players including Anthropic that he said want exemption from antitrust laws and to “get in bed with government” to control AI development.
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Cruz associated this position with leftist ideology and the emerging tech philosophy known as “effective altruism.”
“These folks from effective altruism are all hardcore leftists, and they want to use AI to push their leftist ideology,” Cruz said. “Part of what we’re seeing is a money grab, where there’s an old concept in economics called rent seeking, which is big companies typically go to government and say, ‘Give me a benefit, entrench me.’ We’re seeing the giant AI companies going to government saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you put us in charge of government and let’s set the rules so no one could compete with us.'”
Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., told Digital last week that effective altruism is associated with what he called the “AI doomerism movement.”
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook Inc., speaks at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Sept. 12, 2011. (Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Facebook co-founder and billionaire Democratic mega-donor Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna have been leading financial backers of organizations associated with the effective altruism movement. Moskovitz left Facebook in 2008.
The couple founded Coefficient Giving, formerly known as Open Philanthropy, and remains its “main funders,” according to the organization. Tuna serves as its president.
Coefficient Giving says its artificial intelligence work has expanded rapidly, with $168 million committed to AI safety, security and field-building in 2024 and $351 million in 2025. The organization says it is on track to commit more than $1 billion to AI policy advocacy in 2026.
In a 2021 grant application description, the organization said it seeks “to fund programs and events in a variety of areas of interest to Coefficient Giving — including effective altruism, global catastrophic risks, biosecurity, AI for epistemics, forecasting, and other areas.”
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In 2015, Coefficient Giving launched “Project Tailwind,” an initiative where the Moskovitz-funded organization issued a “call for founders to launch ambitious AI safety initiatives.”
