War Official Claims Foreign Adversaries Behind Anti-AI, Anti-Data Center Movement

Inside the White House, a senior Pentagon official laid out a stark claim: America's adversaries are waging a coordinated campaign to convince Americans to reject the infrastructure that will determine who leads in artificial intelligence. Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, told Fox News that foreign powers are running psychological operations designed to stoke opposition to data centers and AI development—betting that if they can slow America's progress, they preserve their own competitive position.

The logic, Michael explained, is straightforward. An adversary that fears being outpaced in superintelligence has every reason to seed doubt at home. "It is natural from a propaganda standpoint that your adversary, who doesn't want you to be developing super intelligence ahead of them, is going to try to psyop your population into believing that," he said. He framed data centers as the essential fuel for the coming AI race, and suggested that the visible opposition movement across the country—protests in cities nationwide, organized resistance to new facilities—bears the fingerprints of foreign manipulation.

Senator Ted Cruz drew a parallel to earlier foreign efforts to undermine American energy independence. Middle Eastern countries, he noted, had funded anti-fracking movements in the U.S., reasoning that if Americans could be persuaded to reject domestic oil and gas development, they would become dependent on foreign suppliers instead. The same calculus applies to AI infrastructure, Cruz argued. If adversaries can convince Americans to reject data centers, the country becomes reliant on Chinese AI capabilities. "That's great for China, and it's terrible for America," he told Fox News.

The question of foreign money flowing into anti-data-center activism has drawn congressional attention. Neville Roy Singham, a 72-year-old American tech entrepreneur who sold his company for $785 million in 2017 and now lives in Shanghai, has channeled $278 million into a network of nonprofits since that sale. Among the recipients are the Party for Socialism and Liberation and the ANSWER Coalition, both organizations that identify as pro-China communist groups. In July, the Boston chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation posted on social media opposing data centers, framing them as tools of billionaire control. "Workers are rising up across the country in a growing movement against the tech billionaires," the post read, citing fights against data centers in hundreds of cities.

At a Chapel Hill protest last month, activists from both groups carried signs merging anti-Trump messaging with support for communist Cuba and opposition to AI development. The convergence of messaging—communist ideology, anti-billionaire rhetoric, and opposition to American technological advancement—raised questions among lawmakers about whether domestic activism was genuinely grassroots or shaped by foreign-aligned funding and coordination.

Within the Department of War itself, the stakes of the AI race are already visible. Michael reported that AI usage among military personnel has exploded since Pete Hegseth became Secretary. The number of users has grown from roughly 70,000 out of a 3.5 million-person workforce to approximately 1.7 million today. The department is deploying artificial intelligence across enterprise operations, warfighting, and intelligence gathering. The efficiency gains are substantial: military personnel are condensing work that once took 200 hours into two-hour tasks. AI systems allow operators to catalog assets, anticipate adversary capabilities, time operations more precisely, and process orders faster.

Data center expansion has become a flashpoint in the midterm election cycle, with lawmakers taking sharply different positions on whether development should accelerate or slow. Michael's comments frame the debate not as a legitimate policy disagreement but as terrain where foreign adversaries are actively working to shape American public opinion. Whether that framing will shift the political calculus remains unclear—but it signals that the Pentagon now views opposition to AI infrastructure as a national security concern worthy of public attention.