Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told Fox News Digital that winning the artificial intelligence race against China is “the single most important economic question facing America today.”
Cruz said opposition to new data centers, which power AI systems, is often part of a coordinated and well-funded campaign rather than organic grassroots concern. He compared it to past efforts by Middle Eastern countries to fund anti-fracking movements in the United States.
“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.”
No direct funding from the Chinese government toward U.S. data center opposition has been publicly revealed. But in June, OpenAI said it had banned ChatGPT accounts believed to originate in China that were generating social media comments and images claiming data centers were driving up Americans’ electricity costs.
OpenAI said it shut down “two clusters of ChatGPT accounts likely originating from China” after they were used “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.”
Values at Stake
Cruz framed the AI competition in terms of contrasting values between the U.S. and China’s ruling Communist Party.
“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 said opposition to AI expansion and data center construction has become the “dominant position on the Democratic side,” which he said aligns with the interests of major AI firms, including Anthropic, that he argued want exemption from antitrust law and closer ties with government to shape AI policy in their favor.
He tied this posture to leftist ideology and the 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.'”
Who Is Funding the Opposition
Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., told Fox News Digital last week that effective altruism is connected to what he called the “AI doomerism movement.”
Facebook co-founder and Democratic mega-donor Dustin Moskovitz, who left Facebook in 2008, and his wife Cari Tuna have been major financial backers of groups associated with effective altruism. The couple founded Coefficient Giving, formerly known as Open Philanthropy, and remain its main funders, with Tuna serving as president.
Coefficient Giving says its AI-related giving has grown sharply, from $168 million committed to AI safety, security and field-building in 2024 to $351 million in 2025. The organization projects it will commit more than $1 billion to AI policy advocacy in 2026.
A 2021 grant application from the group described funding priorities including “effective altruism, global catastrophic risks, biosecurity, AI for epistemics, forecasting, and other areas.” In 2015, the organization launched “Project Tailwind,” calling for founders to launch “ambitious AI safety initiatives.”
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