A Shanghai-based American expatriate who works hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party is using a network of American nonprofits to foment and amplify American opposition to artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it in a bid to propel China past the U.S. in the technological arms race.
A report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute reveals that, for the past five years, nonprofit organizations funded by the tech mogul Neville Roy Singham are churning out papers opposing export controls on advanced semiconductors to China, newsletters that quote CCP officials lambasting America’s approach to the technological arms race, and articles characterizing U.S. data centers as fronts in “the new Cold War on China.”
Several lawmakers cited the report when calling on the administration to investigate, including Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Tom Cotton (R., Ark.), who sent a letter to acting attorney general Todd Blanche in mid-June asking for an investigation into “foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure.” House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Brett Guthrie asked the FBI and the chairmen of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology to provide information on the influence effort.
“Neville Singham has ties to the Chinese Communist Party so it’s no surprise he’s pushing anti-American policies through fake nonprofits,” Cotton told the Washington Free Beacon. “The Department of Justice should launch a full investigation into this attempt to undermine America’s prosperity.”
A sprawling 2023 New York Times investigation identified Singham, who sold his technology consulting company, Thoughtworks, in 2017 for $785 million, as the source of a “global web of Chinese propaganda.”
The anti-American, pro-China messages emanate from a vast network of nonprofits including Code Pink, led by Singham’s wife, Jodie Evans, the New York City event space The People’s Forum, which helped foment campus unrest in 2024, and a Massachusetts-based think-tank, Tricontinental, where Singham serves as chairman of the international advisory board and where his son, Nate Singham, once served a researcher.
Tricontinental’s executive director, Vijay Prashad, wrote on social media in 2021 that Singham’s money was the “original source” for Tricontinental’s endowment, describing Singham as “a Marxist with a massive software company!”
Devoted to Marxist-inspired social change, Tricontinental is now the hub of the Singham network’s opposition to America’s efforts to secure itself from Chinese technologies and to stay ahead of the CCP in the artificial intelligence race.
In November 2021, more than a year after President Donald Trump banned companies that use American technology from producing semiconductors for the Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE, but before President Joe Biden imposed stringent export controls on advanced chips, Tricontinental identified export controls as a flash point. The think tank published a paper, “Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle,” which argued that while “China’s state capacity has allowed it to be the first country to implement a commercial 5G network on a large scale,” its dependence on American processing chips and technologies is “the main choke-point for the US to delay or even block China’s progress.”
The Biden administration enacted those export controls in October 2022. Tricontinental’s April 2023 newsletter opened by quoting Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning charging that the U.S. was “abusing export control measures to wantonly block and hobble Chinese enterprises,” behavior he predicted would backfire.
Earlier this year, in March 2026, Tricontinental pushed back against the notion that the U.S. and China are engaged in great power competition. Rather, the conflict is between “two fundamentally different logics of technological development.” In the U.S., a logic “rooted in monopoly and rent extraction”; in China, a logic rooted in “production, scale, and diffusion.”
Code Pink, a left-wing protest group that was once a vocal critic of China’s human rights violations but that now denies the Uygher genocide, warned in January that, as a result of data centers, “toxic chemicals are seeping into the lungs” of those who live near them, “causing asthma and long-term illness.” Among the other potential maladies it blamed on data centers: hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, toxic waste and “electronic pollution.”
The Bitcoin Policy Institute report’s author, Sam Lyman, a former senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, said Congress should use its power to subpoena the leaders of the numerous Singham-backed nonprofits.
“It’s time that Congress consider using its subpoena power to get answers from these nonprofit executives,” Lyman told the Free Beacon, and “time to subpoena Neville Singham himself,” though Singham’s location in Shanghai would make it difficult to enforce.
The New York Times described China’s cultivation of its own propaganda outlets as well as foreigners like Singham to produce something that looks like “an organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points, echo one another, and are echoed in turn by the Chinese state media.”
The Free Beacon reported in April how Chinese propaganda outlets, including China Daily, China’s Global Times, and Beijing’s state broadcaster, China Global Television Network, are producing a thrum of content in the U.S. aimed at stoking opposition to AI and, in particular, driving the narrative that data centers are going to drive energy prices through the roof.
As Republicans on Capitol Hill are drawing attention to foreign meddling, particularly from China, in the domestic AI debate, a handful of mainstream media and events outlets have begun to assert that the CCP is being a “scapegoat” for grassroots domestic opposition. Semafor reported last month that China was “becoming a scapegoat for US data center backlash,” arguing that “invoking Beijing isn’t a new phenomenon in Washington.”
Prince George’s County, Md., has temporarily halted data center development after a campaign championed by the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Charlotte, N.C. approved a five-month moratorium on data center development on June 8 after the party organized a door-knocking campaign.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which says it “exists to carry out the struggle for socialism in the United States,” does not disclose its funding but is deeply enmeshed with the Singham network. The party’s co-founder, Brian Becker, serves as a podcast host on Singham-funded BreakThroughNews, whose studios are located inside the Singham-funded People’s Forum. One of the party’s “central committee members,” Becker’s son, Ben, is the editor in chief of BreakThroughNews and the editor of the PSL publication Liberation. Claudia de la Cruz, a co-founder of the People’s Forum, was the PSL’s presidential candidate.
Read the full article here
