"Utahns took to the streets of Salt Lake City last week to oppose the construction of a 40,000-acre data center backed by billionaire “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary in the largely undeveloped northwest corner of the state.

His fiery response was quickly echoed by the Trump administration but triggered worries in tech and conservative policy circles that Silicon Valley’s struggles to sell skeptical Americans on the benefits of the artificial intelligence boom could soon become even more difficult.

O’Leary claimed in a video posted Monday that “nefarious accounts out of the country” linked to the Chinese Communist Party were driving the backlash to his project, by flooding Utah with false claims in a foreign-backed influence campaign aimed at stopping America’s AI buildout.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum echoed those claims on Fox Business on Tuesday. “Any place that’s trying to build data centers is getting bombarded with foreign-directed propaganda to try to block these from being built,” he said. “This is just another attack on the U.S. and our ability to be competitive.”

Conservative and tech-related think tanks have recently made similar claims.

Neither Burgum nor O’Leary, who is Canadian, shared conclusive evidence backing their claims of malign foreign influence."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/05/29/shark-tank-kevin-oleary-claims-china-stirred-data-center-protests/

#USA #Disinformation #Propaganda #DataCenters #AntiAI #AIPopulism #DataCenters #AI #BigTech #SiliconValley

"As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.

A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.

“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.

There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.

“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.

Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”"

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-new-intel-agency-eyes-ai

#USA #Surveillance #Intelligence #AI #AIPopulism #AntiAI #USCongress

"Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.

Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.

"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City," the report reads. The term "anti-tech violent extremism" does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.

In the same Intelligence Bureau assessment, analysts also describe a novel threat emerging in the wake of the arrest and trial of Ziz Laota, an extreme rationalist who allegedly led a small cultlike group, three members of which have been charged with murder, tied to an obsessive ideology focused on the existential risk posed by AI.

While the Zizian ideology is extremist in nature, a less extreme version of the same fears surrounding the cataclysmic potential of AI are a common concern among AI alignment experts, machine learning engineers, and even frontier AI companies. Nonetheless, the Intelligence Bureau warns that "paranoid views regarding AI" may proliferate in the aftermath of the Zizians' trial..."

https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti-tech-extremism/

#USA #Trump #AntiAI #AIPopulism

"In April, to great fanfare, Anthropic refused to release a new model, Claude Mythos, which the company said could find and exploit security vulnerabilities in every tested piece of software, including those used in critical pieces of global I.T. infrastructure. It’s not exactly clear how far ahead Mythos really was on these benchmarks, but it appears to have inspired the White House’s apparent about-face. Yet six months from now, there will inevitably be an open-source version of Mythos, perhaps not quite as good but much cheaper to produce, that many more users around the world will have access to — and be able to customize to their own purposes. Maybe the state-of-the-art models will win out, in competitions like this, with the leading labs staying far enough ahead of ragtag upstarts to protect themselves. But if this is a race, it doesn’t have an obvious finish line, and it doesn’t really seem winner-take-all. The political scientist Jeffrey Ding calls it a “diffusion marathon.”

This is what A.I. people mean when they sometimes describe A.I. as a “general-purpose technology,” like steam engines, electricity or, more recently, computers and the internet. Some of the inventors and entrepreneurs who developed and refined those technologies made huge fortunes in their time, disrupting quite a lot of the world they inherited and giving us, ultimately, much of the world we ourselves live in. But none of them retained absolute control over those technologies for very long, let alone over the long-run future they unleashed. We still know the names of the robber barons, and live still somewhat in their shadows. But we are not their serfs. Are we sure A.I. will be different?"

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/magazine/ai-populism-backlash-altman.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #SiliconValley #Billionaires #AIPopulism

"The calculation on the part of tech executives appears to be that deregulation is a winning political bet. But trust in AI is lower in the US than it is in the EU, where regulation at least signals that someone is responsible for protecting the public interest.

For the moment, the protests are fragmented: environmental protesters, child safety campaigners, democracy advocates and labour activists are not speaking with one voice. Whoever manages to unite these groups by building a popular AI regulation movement will tap into new political power.

AI companies have spent years presenting tech products as too strategically important to regulate, and politicians as too technically incompetent to govern them. But if companies want to behave like states, surveilling people, curating information flows and restructuring labour markets, then citizens will seek to hold them accountable as states. If not with legislation, then with their wallets. The “botlash” is a potent political force."

https://www.ft.com/content/ecead6b9-eb42-4a85-bd33-073c659e84bf

#AI #AIBubble #AIHype #BigTech #USA #AIPopulism #Botlash

"Data centers offer an almost perfectly sympathetic NIMBY cause. They’re a drain on local resources, straining infrastructure and driving up utility prices. They exist to support a technology about which people are fairly pessimistic across the political spectrum. They’re pitched as investments in an exciting future, but that future will unfold elsewhere while your town, now designated as an infrastructural non-place, is just stuck with a big jobless box that uses more power and water than everyone else combined.

The surge in local lobbying isn’t about winning this argument — good luck with that! — so much as it’s about getting as much done as possible while the companies still can, buying support at the state level and breaking ground in as many municipalities as possible before data-center backlash becomes a universal condition of local politics in America. AI firms always talk about how they’re in a technological race with one another or against China in which every day counts. But they’re also in a race to take advantage of a brief domestic political moment during which they’re relatively unencumbered and haven’t yet been metabolized into American politics. At the national, state, and local levels, this may be as good as the AI industry will ever have it. And ahead of the midterms — not to mention the prospect of 2028 — it’s lobbying like it’s running out of time."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/why-big-ai-is-lobbying-before-the-ai-backlash-begins.html

#AI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #BigTech #AIPopulism #Politics #Lobbying

"The SFO-DCA flight was not supposed to exist. Per the DCA Perimeter Rule, established in 1966, nonstop flights are generally limited to 1,250 miles from Washington. Meanwhile, San Francisco is 2,442 miles away, nearly twice the permitted boundary. But Nancy Pelosi—our lord and savior—lobbied then-DOT-head Pete Buttigieg for an exemption via the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. The Airport Authority balked: citing noise, pollution, congestion, and other decel concerns. But their cries fell on deaf ears. Rep. Pelosi, reclining peacefully in first class in a cocoon of bodyguards, was aboard my flight in last Monday morning.

It’s a good thing, too, because the SF-DC axis is more important than ever. This, everyone can agree upon. Palantir is hiring like crazy for their DC offices, Tim Cook is clapping for Melania, and David Sacks and co.—in spite of it all—have remained in the president’s good graces, fending off chip controls and woke regulations.

I’m officially in town for the kickoff of the Omidyar Network’s Reporters In Residence program. But my greater goal is to understand how AI is being politicized out east—shifting from the exclusive remit of natsec wonks to a broader bipartisan group monitoring the technology’s societal effects. For five days straight, from 8am to 10pm, I pack my calendar with a battery of coffees, happy hours, and dinners with figures across the AI policy and media landscape. I sought to find out: Who are the tribes? Where are the fault lines? What risks and opportunities get people fired up?

I was especially keen to speak with the growing faction of “AI populists,” the group ideologically furthest from my technocratic SF scene. And my reductive two-line summary is as follows: All the money is on one side and all the people are on the other. We aren’t ready for how much people hate AI."

https://jasmi.news/p/ai-populism

#AI #AISafety #AIPopulism #GenerativeAI #USA #WashingtonDC #Politics #AIRegulation