Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) said Saturday that China and Russia are working to turn Americans against artificial intelligence and data centers, pointing to polling he said breaks in opposite directions in the two countries.
Speaking with Breitbart News’s Washington bureau chief Matthew Boyle on Breitbart News Saturday, the Pennsylvania Republican talked about the difference in polling on attitudes towards AI and data centers between China and the United States.
McCormick tied the divide to a foreign influence effort and to the tech industry’s own early missteps.
“The reason it’s so polarized in the United States is in part because China is leading a campaign along with Russia to turn people against AI and data centers here,” McCormick said. “AI and data centers are 80-20 popular versus unpopular in China.” It’s the reverse here in America. “That’s not by accident. It’s because the Chinese are shaping the dialogue, and it’s because these big tech firms did a bad job early on in rolling out these data centers.”
The senator said losing the AI race would carry consequences beyond the economy.
“If China were to be the AI leader, it would give them a military advantage, an economic advantage, and they could set the rules for the world,” he said.
To keep pace, McCormick floated a “FINRA-like” model for AI oversight, an industry-led set of rules and enforcement guided by the federal government.
On data centers, the former hedge fund executive said no senator should dictate where they are built, describing agreements in Pennsylvania towns like Bloomsburg and Homer City that he said protect energy costs and water, expand the tax base, and hire local labor.
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He also highly commended Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), calling the Democrat “the best surprise I’ve had since joining the Senate” and saying “his party’s trying to cancel him.” Fetterman has broken with much of his party on AI, writing last month that “China continues to fuel and benefit from our overreaction.”
Those remarks followed a disclosure by X in August that its safety team had identified a suspected Chinese bot farm of roughly 200,000 accounts, 200 of which it said were posting to “manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.” That finding came after a June OpenAI report detailing PRC-linked accounts, dubbed the “Data Center Bandwagon” campaign, that used ChatGPT to generate posts claiming data centers were driving up electricity prices.
“The CCP will leverage every tool, including American AI and American social media platforms, to divide and weaken us,” Cale Brown, chair of Polaris National Security, told Breitbart News. “At the same time, they ban these same social media tools in their own country because the party’s greatest fear is of their own people.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.