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The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion
The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.
Jul 27, 2026
As Big Tech races to build water-guzzling, energy-hungry data centers for its artificial intelligence, talk of an “AI race” between the United States and China has permeated public discourse. Pundits, politicians, and the media have all joined tech corporations in selling this narrative. And it’s giving license to Big Tech and their political handmaidens to ruin our communities, exploit our every action (both online and via AI-powered surveillance), and steal the wealth of human knowledge for private gain.
But the idea of an AI race between China and the US isn’t grounded in reality. The researchers, companies, and governments behind Chinese and US AI development are pursuing completely different goals.
The discourse in the US assumes that achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—computers that mimic human consciousness—would be so momentous and earth-shattering that clearly this must be the goal of anyone pursuing AI development. But that’s not the main goal of Chinese AI development. And a competition in which the competitors are running toward different finish lines isn’t a race.
If we allow the myth of an AI race with China to give Big Tech free rein, we face a more polluted, less equal world.
A Race Doesn’t Have Two Different Finish Lines
While the US is focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), Chinese developers are focused on AI embedded in products. It’s ChatGPT versus robots.
Yes, China is developing LLMs, although largely in an open-source way as opposed to the for-profit competition in the US. Recent news stories report that China is “catching” the US in LLM development. Indeed, the latest Chinese model outperforms leading US models. But this isn’t evidence of an LLM-AGI race. Instead, it shows that without making AGI its main focus, China is capable of developing its own models almost as quickly as US companies.
If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced.
More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).
In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.
This isn’t to argue that China is doing it “right” and the US is doing it “wrong.” Either approach will lead to a future in which citizens become increasingly disempowered. In which work becomes more scarce and less lucrative for most people. And in which a handful of billionaires grow wealthier and more powerful.
But the arguments being hauled out to support the destructive growth of hyperscale data centers are based on a fallacy. There is no need to “beat China.” China and the US are racing on separate tracks, in different races, with different finish lines.
These two separate approaches also explain the mind-boggling scale of the data center invasion we currently face. The massive hyperscale data centers—recent proposals would demand up to 5 gigawatts, enough electricity to power roughly 3.75 million US households—are only “required” because the US is racing toward AGI. Meanwhile, the embodied AI dominating in China does not require the same amount of computational power.
The truth is, we don’t need hyperscale data centers to “beat China.” We aren’t racing China. We’re killing ourselves so Silicon Valley can race itself.
How Big Tech Is Weaponizing the “AI Race” to Build Data Centers
Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.
If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.
We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.
At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.
We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet. But the opposition is real and organic, and no amount of disinformation and pushing the “AI race against China” scare tactic will derail the movement.
Big Tech Is Selling Us a Dystopian Future
The myth of an AI race with China threatens to propel us into Big Tech’s vision of the future—one that’s more unequal than ever. Yes, tech leaders suggest their algorithms will cure cancer, but their real goal is and has been to increase their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.
Even as American Tech Broligarchs have distanced themselves from earlier prophecies of widespread job loss, their vision of the future will see the vast majority of us out of meaningful work. We’ll be subject to living off whatever meager handouts are created in an attempt to mollify us.
Even if there were an AI race, is it worth running, let alone winning, if the prize is a dystopian future of mass misery with a thin layer of super wealthy tech oligarchs at the top?
At the same time, our movement will be traced whether or not we use the electronic gadgets they sell us. Already, surveillance devices linked to AI can recognize our faces, record our license plates, and report our movements. Companies and governments can buy this data in order to track us.
Meanwhile, “surveillance pricing” allows companies to change prices in an instant so that they can exploit our needs for their profit. Deepfake videos have already added to the rapidly decaying trust in a commonly shared world and a basic set of facts necessary for a functioning democracy. And this is but a scratch of the surface.
Even if there were an AI race, is it worth running, let alone winning, if the prize is a dystopian future of mass misery with a thin layer of super wealthy tech oligarchs at the top?
Big Tech’s Dystopian Vision Isn’t Inevitable
But we should be clear. This dystopian vision is not the inevitable outcome of unstoppable technological “progress” as the Tech Broligarchs would have us believe. Each and every decision being made to advance AI is a political decision. And, for now, we still have the ability to determine our political future.
Across the country, there is a growing resistance to the nightmare being shoved down our throats. Communities are coming together to fight the spread of destructive hyperscale data centers. Already in 2026, more than $130 billion-worth of proposed data center projects have been defeated and canceled.
That’s the real “AI Race.” Not China versus the US, but us versus Big Tech.
Communities are taking control of their futures by placing moratoriums on new data centers. New York enacted a one-year pause on new centers, and there is growing support for a nationwide pause in Congress.
We aren’t destined to live in Elon Musk’s fever dream. We have the power to stop him and his fellow Broligarchs. When we organize, we win. That’s the real “AI Race.” Not China versus the US, but us versus Big Tech. That’s not only a race worth running—it’s one we have to win.
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As Outcry Grows Over Data Centers, Trump Claims 'Smart' Towns Want the Energy-Sucking, Water-Guzzling Facilities
The president's comments revealed how he is "detached from the feelings of working-class communities, in many ways," said one progressive organizer.
Jul 24, 2026
Days after his own supporters organized 142 demonstrations against artificial intelligence data centers in 42 states, President Donald Trump claimed that "smart communities" across the US "really want" the facilities known for raising electricity bills, consuming millions of gallons of water daily, and creating few permanent job opportunities.
At an event promoting his "Ratepayer Protection Pledge"—a plan to secure deals with major tech companies to keep household utility bills down in communities with data centers, which experts say is unlikely to produce meaningful savings for families—the president suggested that recent polls showing 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their towns are the result of "propaganda... trying to convince everybody that this isn't a positive thing."
"You have some communities that really want this," said Trump. "And frankly those are the smart communities, because it means a tremendous number of jobs... They're begging for them."
Trump claims that “smart” communities are “begging” for data centers.
Video via: @Acyn pic.twitter.com/mKXo9QlqyZ
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) July 23, 2026
Faiz Shakir, founder of the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union and an adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has called for a moratorium on data centers, said the comments showed how Trump is "detached from the feelings of working-class communities, in many ways."
The Tennessee Holler pointed to a recent survey showing that even "cherry red areas" like Johnson City, Tennessee oppose the construction of the facilities that store and process massive amounts of data, for which Trump has pushed to slash regulations.
Trump's comments came as the climate advocacy group 350.org issued a call for a moratorium on new data center construction.
"Right now, ordinary families are paying more on their electricity bills so that data centers can get artificially cheap power, negotiated in secret with almost no accountability for the real costs," said Candice Fortin, US campaigns manager at 350.org. "That's backwards."
According to Consumer Reports, at least 1,489 new data centers are currently being planned or are under construction in the US.
But with grassroots protests in communities in Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states, about 100 data center projects were cancelled last year "or hit major roadblocks, and the rate of cancellations has quadrupled since 2024," said 350.org.
The group, like hundreds of others have recently, called on Congress to pass a national moratorium on data center construction. Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) unveiled a bill in March to halt construction of the facilities. Last week, New York's Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, signed an executive order imposing a one-year state-level ban on the construction of “hyperscale” data centers that can consume 50 megawatts of power.
"A moratorium isn't about being anti-technology, it's about refusing to let communities and ratepayers be steamrolled into deals that benefit billionaires while everyone else pays," said Fortin. "Data centers are driving up our bills today and locking in fossil fuels for decades to come. That's not innovation. That's a bad deal being forced on every ratepayer in America."
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EU Fines Google for Violating Digital Markets Act With Search Engine, App Store Practices
Regulators announced the penalty as President Donald Trump is considering new tariffs against the European Union.
Jul 23, 2026
A day before President Donald Trump was expected to announce new trade tariffs on the European Union, the bloc's regulators on Thursday announced it had fined Google for anticompetitive business practices related to its search engine and app store.
Google has violated the Digital Markets Act (DMA), said the European Commission, by giving priority to its own services in search results and by preventing app developers from steering customers to cheaper products or app stores other than Google's Play Store.
The commission fined Google €460 million ($524 million) for its breach of search engine rules and €430 million ($490 million) for the app store violation, bringing the total fine to more than $1 billion—a fraction of the tech giant's assets. The fine was announced a day after Google parent company Alphabet reported a quarterly profit of $112.1 billion.
Brussels-based journalist Dave Keating quoted Alexandra Geese, a member of European Parliament representing the Green Party, as saying that "the size of this fine is disappointing and bears no relation to the damage Google has done to the European economy."
"Plenty of people would dodge the fare if the fine were cheaper than the ticket," said Geese.
The fine comes weeks after the European Court of Justice upheld a $4.67 billion fine from 2018 over the unfair advantage it gave to its own apps by pre-installing the apps on smartphones.
Teresa Ribera, the commission's executive vice president for a clean, just, and competitive transition, said Thursday that the DMA promises protections for "fairness, choice, and innovation in digital markets for the benefit of all European citizens.”
“The best products should succeed because they’re better, not because they’re owned by the company running the search engine,” said Ribera.
Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, claimed the fine would cause "product degradation" and said the company is evaluating a possible appeal.
The fine, he said, will force Google "to strip away real-time search features Europeans love—like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants—and dismantle safety protections on Google Play."
The company has 60 days to comply with the penalty and could face further fines of up to 5% of its global revenue if it fails to do so.
Google has been fined more than $10 billion euros by the EU for anticompetitive behavior since 2017.
Ribera called on the company to return to the negotiating table with European regulators to determine its full compliance with the DMA.
“It is quite a strong message to Google to say: We expect from you a serious proposal in terms of compliance,” she said. “The intention of our regulation is to ensure well-functioning markets, not to punish anyone. But, of course, in certain cases, we need to come up with sanctions.”
The fine was announced hours before Trump's tariffs against 60 countries were set to expire; the president has threatened new tariffs against the European Union in retaliation for what he and Republican lawmakers view as unfair targeting of US tech companies.
But Ribera told reporters that the European Commission is "bound by the law" and announced the fine despite fears in the EU that Trump could retaliate with higher tariffs than the ones he levied last year.
“I don’t think that any of us being part of the Commission could be respected," said Ribera, "if we could decide whether to do or not to do because someone else is trying to tell us what to do.”
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Calls for Guardrails Grow as OpenAI Discloses 'Unprecedented' Autonomous Cyber Attack
"What more evidence do we need, absent a significant real-world incident, that catastrophic risk from AI is a real and present danger to us all?" said one expert.
Jul 22, 2026
In a striking incident that highlights the growing risks of unchecked advanced artificial intelligence development, ChatGPT maker OpenAI admitted Tuesday that one of its AI models autonomously breached the systems of the prominent open-source platform Hugging Face during recent internal testing.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X that "we had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models" and "are sharing what we have learned so far."
In a blog post, OpenAI acknowledged, "Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models."
"After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models—including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable prerelease model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes—while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities," the company continued.
"We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly," OpenAI said. "We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of."
Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue responded to the disclosure in a statement saying: “We're grateful for the collaboration with OpenAI on this and other topics. This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we've long believed—AI safety won't be solved by any single company working in secret. It will be solved in the open, collaboratively, with broad access to AI for every defender, everywhere.”
Some observers praised OpenAI for its frank disclosure. Some critics were not impressed.
"Let's not celebrate them for telling us about it. I will celebrate when they stop putting my life at risk," said David Krueger, founder of Evitable, an advocacy group which posits that "we must end the race to replace humanity."
While many mainstream media outlets described OpenAI models as "going rogue," the models were given a specific task during internal testing: perform as well as possible on the ExploitGym cybersecurity benchmark, which evaluates how effectively an AI can execute complex cyberattacks and exploit vulnerabilities in controlled scenarios.
"Use of the terms 'rogue'/'loss of human control' leads to groupthink as people lack critical skills to understand the difference between 'autonomy' and faulty reward functions in AI on a task it was directed and given access to do," Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, said Wednesday on X.
"Very few people understand existing limitations of sandboxing, in addition to the tools and scaffolding AI are given to achieve this tasks," Khlaaf added, referring to the tightly controlled virtual environments in which potentially unsafe software code can "play" without real-world consequences.
However, instead of staying within the sandbox and solving the problems using only the allowed tools and environment, OpenAI's models treated everything standing in the way of a higher score as a problem to solve—in this case, by finding a way to get online and hacking into Hugging Face's systems to access data.
OpenAI's models were essentially just doing their assignmenta—and that's precisely why the incident has alarm bells sounding.
Peter Wildeford, head of policy at the AI Policy Institute, said on X that the OpenAI incident "happened because the model wanted to do well on an exam. The easiest way to do that, the AI figured, was to hack the company. And so it did."
"This was not some malevolent attacker using AI to do harm," he added. "The AI itself was the attacker."
Experts call this a classic example of AI misalignment. As AI advances to the point where it will likely outsmart humans one day, the challenge of ensuring that advanced systems reliably pursue goals that match what humans actually want becomes increasingly difficult—and dangerous.
A misaligned, superintelligent AI could take uncontrolled autonomous actions at massive scale to achieve its goals, potentially causing an existential catastrophe like the subjugation of humanity or even its extinction. Prominent AI pioneers who have warned about this outcome include Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Altman—who in 2015 said, “I think AI will probably most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there’ll be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
The OpenAI incident sparked renewed calls for more robust AI regulation.
"This incident is a quintessential warning shot, and we need to see it for what it is," said Theo Bearman, a researcher at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy and the former AI regulation and readiness policy lead in the UK government’s Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology.
"What more evidence do we need, absent a significant real-world incident, that catastrophic risk from AI is a real and present danger to us all, and that we need meaningful regulation of frontier models, especially the most powerful instantiations deployed internally within these companies?" he added.
"This incident is a quintessential warning shot, and we need to see it for what it is."
Vaibhav Sisinty, founder of the edtech platform GrowthSchool, said on social media that "AI doesn't need intent to be dangerous. It needs a clear goal and no guardrails."
Wildeford concurred, stressing that "no one has to misuse an AI for the AI to cause harm."
"We cannot rely solely on testing models just before commercial release," he said. "We cannot rely on hoping AI companies volunteer useful safety information. The government needs visibility into what these AI companies are building and what these advanced AIs are doing."
While advocacy groups, the United Nations, and dozens of national governments are urging more robust regulation of AI development, the United States under President Donald Trump, the Republican-controlled Congress, and Big Tech's army of lobbyists is strongly opposed to guardrails.
Trump has rolled back regulations, including some meager steps taken during the Biden administration to bolster safety.
A bill introduced last September by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-Wash.) would, if passed, impose a temporary moratorium on state laws regulating artificial intelligence.
As was the case in the breakneck nuclear arms race during the Cold War, US officials have attempted to justify unfettered AI development by claiming that any slowdown would give adversaries like China an edge.
Ricky Ho, who manages the Singapore-based Four Capital Fund, said Wednesday that the timing of the OpenAI incident "is particularly interesting because it comes just days after Moonshot's Kimi K3 demonstrated that China's frontier AI capabilities continue advancing at an extraordinary pace, forcing the conversation to shift away from whether China can catch up toward how the United States should preserve its lead."
"OpenAI is effectively arguing that the US now needs a coherent national AI strategy rather than the current patchwork of ad hoc interventions, export controls, and state-level regulations that create uncertainty for developers," Ho continued.
"The proposal for a standardized federal safety review process should also be viewed through that lens," he said. "Markets often interpret regulation as a headwind, but clear rules frequently reduce uncertainty and make it easier for companies to invest aggressively. The semiconductor industry, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals all benefited from having predictable regulatory frameworks, even if compliance costs increased. AI may ultimately follow the same path."
"Perhaps the most important takeaway is that AI governance is rapidly becoming a geopolitical issue rather than simply a technology issue," Ho added. "Frontier models are increasingly being discussed alongside export controls, cyber defense, industrial policy, and national competitiveness, reinforcing our view that AI is evolving into strategic infrastructure comparable to electricity, telecommunications, or the internet itself."
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Congress: Protect Working People's Retirement From Risky Tech Cos Like SpaceX
Index providers play a prominent role in millions of working peoples’ retirement security, but they are largely unregulated. This needs to change.
Jul 22, 2026
Millions of working people keep their hard-earned money in low-cost index funds to secure a dignified retirement and meet other financial goals. In choosing index funds, these everyday investors assume financial industry intermediaries, regulators, and lawmakers are working to keep this investment strategy a safe and conservative one.
But the infrastructure that has historically given index fund investors this sense of security is eroding. Index providers, exchanges, and asset managers are all changing their policies and practices in ways that weaken investor protection to the benefit of executives, directors, and other corporate insiders, just in time for several Silicon Valley companies hitting the market.
Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is turning away from its investor protection mission to protect corporate insiders, and states are weakening investor protection tools to convince corporate management to pick them as their state of incorporation.
SpaceX provides a clear example. Elon Musk’s company went public in June at a sky-high valuation divorced from the company’s fundamentals. Mega AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI are also expected to go public soon.
Should we face another financial crisis or drastic market correction, Congress must not bail out corporate insiders or other powerful financial players that benefited from inflating the bubble and instead focus on protecting regular investors, families, and communities.
Traditionally, the major indices have required companies’ stock to trade publicly for a length of time to establish their financial stability before adding them to an index. But nearly all the major index providers have recently changed their rules to fast-track SpaceX and other large, recently public companies. (Notably, the S&P held the line after pressure from House Financial Services Committee Ranking Member Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the AFL-CIO, and my organization—Americans for Financial Reform.)
The fast-tracking by the Russell 3000, the Nasdaq 100, and other major indices sets the stage for deep-pocketed early investors to cash out while leaving retirement savers holding the bag in the likely event the company’s share price comes down to better reflect the company’s actual viability.
To make matters worse, most SpaceX investors will have little redress in the event they are harmed by wrongdoing on the part of the company, Musk, or other insiders. SpaceX is trying to ban class actions and force lawsuits into Texas Business Court or arbitration (both notoriously insider-friendly fora).
SpaceX was able to include a forced arbitration provision in its IPO deal after the SEC made an about-face, effectively allowing companies to block a powerful tool to combat corporate fraud and misconduct.
SpaceX is also taking advantage of Texas corporate law provisions that make it exceedingly difficult to bring claims under state law to hold corporate insiders accountable for wrongdoing.
In the meantime, regular shareholders are being denied the opportunity to provide meaningful input. Musk retains 85% voting power in a multi-class share structure where holders of one class of shares have 10 times the voting rights of shares available to the public.
One of the more disturbing implications of this structure: Only Musk can fire himself.
Meanwhile, as massive AI companies are seeking to go public, the SEC has proposed rules that would permit SpaceX and other large companies to make significantly fewer disclosures compared with what large public companies are currently required to make.
To protect working families’ retirement funds, Congress and financial regulators need to step in. Index providers play a prominent role in millions of working peoples’ retirement security, but they are largely unregulated. This needs to change. Relatedly, asset managers of index funds need to be further regulated so they do not effectively outsource their responsibilities to largely unregulated index providers or use their voting power to rubber-stamp management decisions.
We also need to curb the power of corporate insiders, who call the shots on where a company is incorporated and on which exchanges they’re listed, by setting a federal floor that protects long-term investors and workers.
Congress should also set more stringent requirements for the SEC so it doesn’t lose sight of its mission to protect investors, including by mandating robust disclosures; disallowing forced arbitration; having a more public, thorough process for reviewing the paperwork companies need to file before they can go public; and eliminating or sharply curtailing the SEC’s authority to exempt regulated entities from requirements.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon recently warned that today’s bullish stock market feels like 2007, when the country was on the brink of a financial crash. When that crash hit, working people wound up bearing the brunt of the crisis while Wall Street banks and their corporate clients got bailed out.
Should we face another financial crisis or drastic market correction, Congress must not bail out corporate insiders or other powerful financial players that benefited from inflating the bubble and instead focus on protecting regular investors, families, and communities.
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Whitmer’s Data Center Push Isn’t Just Bad for Michigan—It’s Bad for the World
Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to US-backed conflicts and war.
Jul 16, 2026
“We’re used to people saying ‘fuck no’ and doing it anyway.” These words were seemingly spoken by our very own Gov. Gretchen Whitmer earlier this month, caught on a hot mic chatting with Oracle executive Clay Magouryk. The two were celebrating breaking ground on the controversial new AI data center in rural Saline, Michigan—currently the largest data center project in the country. Gov. Whitmer is apparently happy to sell Michigan out to military tech giants OpenAI and Oracle.
This is the latest in a series of data center projects being forced into communities that have made their opposition crystal clear. Michiganders are "fighting like hell" because they understand exactly what is at stake; Southwest Michigan residents have already filed a class-action lawsuit for the 24/7 noise nuisance that disrupts daily life and reduces property values.
The development of AI data centers creates harm and destruction. The companies that drive this development, such as OpenAI and Palantir, have contracts with the US military and government agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Locally, the influx of these data centers provides infrastructure for mass surveillance and diverts municipal resources. Globally, the push for data center expansion demands massive amounts of minerals and fossil fuels from resource-rich countries in the Global South, which are obtained through US military intervention and US-backed militia groups. As such, we as Michiganders must continue to oppose these data center projects.
The harm these data centers inflict ripples across the world. Data center development depends on imported critical conflict minerals and massive amounts of electricity generated by fossil fuels, which contribute directly to US-backed conflicts and war on Venezuela, Iran, and in Congo. Tantalum, tin, tungsten, and gold, referred to as 3TG, are essential, and their extraction is linked to financing armed groups and militias. The struggle for control over mineral-rich areas has led to prolonged violence in Congo, contributing to millions of deaths and leaving entire regions destabilized.
Gov. Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: Our voices and opposition are flat out ignored in favor of destructive corporations.
Detroit is becoming a hub for technology, manufacturing, and the military-industrial complex, where events like the annual Reindustrialize conference bring together defense contractors, surveillance firms, and policymakers to strategize a future built on automated warfare and mass data extraction. Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing attended, representing key pillars of the US defense and surveillance industry. Palantir’s Project Maven and Where’s Daddy track individuals and automate kill chain recommendations with little human oversight. Lockheed Martin and Boeing produce the missiles, bombs, warcraft, and strike systems that turn algorithmic targeting into genocide.
It’s understandable that some Michiganders might think the development of AI data centers is a good thing, or at least an inevitability. Gov. Whitmer, for one, claims that if Michigan does not lead the charge on these data centers, “they’ll be done elsewhere… with lower wages in a way that abuses the natural resources and jacks up energy prices.” Thus far, this seems to mean that companies that develop these data centers can receive tax breaks and circumvent public input, which sets a disadvantageous precedent.
These data centers, furthermore, are not an inevitability, and they can drastically impact resource usage in their regions. At the Saline data center, even with the closed-loop cooling system to reduce on-site water consumption, water will be consumed indirectly: Increased electricity needs increase the need for water and oil consumption for local power plants. There is also no guarantee that any jobs created will be given to local residents. None of the reported advantages are worth the imperialism needed to supply resources to these data centers, nor the mass surveillance apparatus that comes with them.
Gov. Whitmer’s hot mic comment confirmed what we already suspected: Our voices and opposition are flat out ignored in favor of destructive corporations. Michiganders across the state have stood up and said, "Fuck no" to data centers and more war, yet projects keep moving forward. Residents deserve better than politicians who prioritize tech billionaires and war profiteers over their own people.
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Who Are the Biggest AI Villains? An Industry Watchdog Has Made a List
"The federal government shares the tech industry’s vision for AI to be embedded everywhere, displacing human thought and labor, and deepening the strains on the environment and climate."
Jul 09, 2026
With backlash against the artificial intelligence industry growing throughout the US, one government watchdog has created a database to help keep tabs on the people it describes as the biggest "AI villains."
The Revolving Door Project on Thursday launched a webpage that tracks the actions of major players in the AI industry and their ties to President Donald Trump's administration.
"The Trump administration is all in on artificial intelligence," the Revolving Door Project explained. "The federal government shares the tech industry’s vision for AI to be embedded everywhere, displacing human thought and labor, and deepening the strains on the environment and climate."
The watchdog added that the government is pursuing an "AI first" policy "despite little proof that its value for the American public is anywhere close to commensurate with its costs."
While there are several well known names on the Revolving Door Project's list—including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison—it also shines a light on more obscure figures including Chris Lehane, director of government affairs at OpenAI, and Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI.
Lehane is notable due to his long connections to Democratic Party politics, including a stint as a special assistant counsel in the Clinton administration and work as deputy campaign manager for former Vice President Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. Since then, he has mostly done public relations work for Silicon Valley firms, including Airbnb and Coinbase.
According to The Revolving Door Project, Lehane during the second Trump administration has been a big proponent of an AI regulatory framework that he describes as "reverse federalism" that aims to shut down individual states' powers to put guardrails on the industry.
Brockman, meanwhile, is much more traditionally aligned with the GOP, as he and his wife were the largest donors to the MAGA, Inc. super PAC in 2025, and he is described by the watchdog as "a regular attendee at White House events throughout Trump’s second term."
This coziness has helped Brockman push for policies beneficial to the AI industry such as fast-tracking data center construction and the aforementioned "reverse federalism" regulatory framework.
The Revolving Door Project also pays special attention to Marc Andreesen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), whose allies the watchdog describes as "deeply entrenched" in the Trump administration.
Among the Andreesen acolytes to have worked in the Trump are Sriram Krishnan, a former general partner at a16z who served as a senior AI policy advisor; Peter Bowman-Davis, former engineering fellow at a16z who served as acting chief AI officer at the Department of Health and Human Services; and Scott Kupor, former managing partner at a16z who serves as director of the Office of Personnel Management.
Andreesen himself serves as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which the Revolving Door Project describes as a "vessel... to freely lobby on behalf of the tech industry’s interests without the need for lobbyist intermediaries—especially at meetings with the president and his closest advisors."
In a newsletter explaining the purpose of the tracker, the Revolving Door Project's Fletcher Calcagno wrote that it was needed to help understand why the Trump administration so far has been willing to "accept Big Tech’s maximally irresponsible recommendations" for AI regulation.
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After Tens of Billions in Stock Buybacks, Microsoft Announces Mass Layoff of 4,800 Workers
"Seeing such strong numbers coupled with the mass layoffs at Xbox is not sitting right with many," wrote one tech journalist.
Jul 06, 2026
President Donald Trump has touted his massive corporate tax breaks in 2017 and 2025 not just as handouts to the rich, but as boons for their employees, who could expect to see rising wages and job growth in the coming years.
But one of the policy's biggest beneficiaries, Microsoft, just announced it was laying off thousands of employees in a move described as "cost-cutting," even though the company has spent tens of billions of dollars buying back its own stock.
When Trump's 2017 tax law reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, Americans for Tax Fairness estimated that the company was saving about $16.5 billion per year.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last July, rewrote rules to benefit companies investing in artificial intelligence by allowing them to deduct the cost of data centers and other equipment up front rather than spreading the deductions out over time, and introduced new deductions for research and development expenses.
For Microsoft, which pledged roughly $80 billion globally toward AI data center investment last year, that could translate to up to $16.8 billion in near-term federal tax savings.
The added windfall has been great for Microsoft shareholders. From 2018-25, the company returned roughly $139.5 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks since the Trump-GOP tax cut took effect, according to shareholder reports.
In the first nine months of fiscal year 2026, the first since the new tax breaks went into effect, the company bought back another $13.3 billion, an acceleration from the previous year, according to a form filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
At the same time as the company is ramping up AI investment, however, it is laying off employees.
On Monday, the company announced that it was shedding roughly 2% of its global workforce, eliminating about 4,800 jobs—mostly in its Xbox division—as it allocates more money and resources to the AI arms race.
They are among the more than 20,000 Microsoft employees who have been shown the door since 2025. Additionally, thousands more employees took voluntary buyouts this spring.
Microsoft executive Amy Coleman attributed the cuts to a changing technological landscape.
"Our customers’ needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself—what we do, where we focus, and how we’re organized—has to transform too,” she said. “Companies don’t get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it."
She also stressed that workers were “not being replaced by AI.”
But Eddie Makuch, a writer at GameSpot, noted that the company has been doing terrifically, and despite falling share prices over the past year, remains "the No. 4 biggest company on Earth with a market cap of more than $2.8 trillion."
"Microsoft stockholders might not have been happy with the company’s share price falling, but for the past quarter alone, Microsoft paid out $10.2 billion to shareholders via dividends and share repurchases," he wrote. "These are signs of strength and health for Microsoft. Xbox is a very small piece of Microsoft’s overall business, but seeing such strong numbers coupled with the mass layoffs at Xbox is not sitting right with many."
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Despite Trump's Demand for AI Investment, Treasury Report Warns Industry Poses 'Significant Risk' to US Economy
"There isn’t an AI company with a sustainable business model right now," said a tech insider. "It’s not a healthy industry."
Jul 06, 2026
While President Donald Trump's administration has regularly hyped up the development of artificial intelligence, a draft US Treasury Department report warns that the AI industry could be a financial bubble that will ultimately damage the American economy.
NOTUS, which obtained a copy of the Treasury Department analysis, reported on Monday that it "is a significant departure from the Trump administration’s public tone, which has focused on encouraging unrelenting investment to unlock exponential growth."
Career analysts at the department find that, while many AI firms are on firmer financial footing than the dotcom companies in the late 1990s, they are also much more deeply integrated with the US economy.
Because of this integration, these firms "pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed, or various chokepoints stymie growth," wrote NOTUS.
The report also says that the investments being made into AI infrastructure are so big that they risk damaging the entire financial system if they do not meet certain metrics for productivity growth and profitability.
"Fears of an AI bubble have grown over the last year, including on Capitol Hill, among some Wall Street observers and executives, inside think tanks and even within the ranks of top AI principals," the NOTUS report added. "Prominent economists and institutions... have also raised concerns about overvaluation of AI firms and the risks they pose to the broader economic system."
Dean Baker, co-founder and senior economist of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), noted in an analysis published Friday that AI's long-promised boost to productivity isn't yet showing up in data.
Citing the most recent jobs report from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Baker found that AI's impact on productivity growth at the moment is "invisible."
"The index of aggregate hours grew at a 1.3% rate in the quarter. With [gross domestic product] growth likely coming in close to 2%, we are looking at productivity growth around 1%," Baker explained. "That follows growth of 0.3% in the first quarter and 1.6% in the fourth quarter of 2025. There is zero evidence of any sort of productivity uptick in these data."
Baker argued that this was a contrast with the dotcom era, when productivity growth averaged roughly 2.8% over a four-year period in the late 1990s before the bubble burst.
"We would need rates of productivity growth in the neighborhood of 4% to generate the sort of profits needed to make sense of current market levels," Baker wrote. "It is surprising that the continuing weakness of productivity doesn’t bother stock investors more."
There are also questions about AI's ability to turn a profit.
A Monday report in The New York Times highlighted the predicament of Chinese tech company Alibaba, whose open-source AI model has become extremely popular while at the same time being unprofitable.
"In the first three months of this year, Alibaba reported $1.3 billion in revenue from AI-related products—less than 4% of its total revenue," reported the Times. "That pales in comparison with the company’s plan to spend more than $55 billion by the end of next year to build out its AI infrastructure."
Richard Lin, a vice president at the Silicon Valley firm Datastrato, told the Times that concerns about AI profitability extend beyond Alibaba and to the industry as a whole.
"There isn’t an AI company with a sustainable business model right now," said Lin. "It’s not a healthy industry."
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UN Creates 'AI for Good' Commission—Full of Big Tech Execs
The commission's upcoming first meeting will focus on "strengthening AI infrastructure, accelerating AI's impact on health, education, food security, and disaster response, and ensuring trust and safety," said its CEO co-chair.
Jul 01, 2026
A week after United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on artificial intelligence companies to "come clean" about the full costs of power-sucking data centers, and as a UN panel on Wednesday released a report detailing the risks and impacts of AI, Axios revealed the creation of a related commission that's full of Big Tech executives.
"The UN and its International Telecommunication Union (ITU) are convening the AI for Good Global Commission, which will hold its first meeting on July 8 in Geneva, Switzerland," according to the outlet. It will be co-chaired by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Rwandan President Paul Kagame, with other tech and policy leaders joining as members.
So far, Axios reported, they include ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Estonian President Alar Karis, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez, Microsoft president Brad Smith, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, and AI and tech policymakers from Kazakhstan, Namibia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore.
"AI is the most profound technological transition in history. And our values have to guide every step, because responsibility is the core of AI ethics," Benioff said. The commission will bring together "the people who build AI, deploy it, shape policy, and represent communities."
He added that "our inaugural meeting will focus on where this group is uniquely positioned to act together: strengthening AI infrastructure, accelerating AI's impact on health, education, food security, and disaster response, and ensuring trust and safety."
However, given recent polls showing that the public has limited confidence in large technology companies, opposes constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area, is wary of AI’s impact on daily life, and has concerns about politicians having a "cozy relationship" with Big Tech, the commission may be met with skepticism or even backlash.
In the lead-up to the commission's meeting next week at the ITU's AI for Good Global Summit, the UN plans to hold the inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance, featuring a presentation of the "Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence," published Wednesday.
Established with a UN resolution last August, the panel is the first global scientific body on AI—and, as Guterres said in a statement about its new report, "the panel is intended to help the world separate fact from fakes, and science from slop."
"We are looking to them to provide an authoritative reference point at a moment when reliable, unbiased understanding of AI has never been more critical," the UN chief explained. "I am pleased to say that they have delivered a down payment on that commitment—in record time."
The panel's co-chair, Canadian computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, noted that "AI capabilities are outpacing both scientific understanding and governments' ability to adapt. With growing evidence of deceptive AI behavior, science currently cannot guarantee that as capabilities continue to increase, AI will not cause catastrophic harm, either on its own or due to malicious users."
"To act effectively, global policymakers must understand these systems," he asserted. "This panel provides exactly that: a rigorous, shared scientific foundation to guide our collective way forward."
The report discusses AI's recent advances and expected trajectories; societal applications, from agriculture to education to healthcare; economic implications; security and environmental concerns; impacts on democracy, human rights, and information; potential harms to child safety and culture; and governance of the rapidly developing technology.
"The technology is transformative, but if the world keeps moving along this trajectory, humanity will fail to realize the gains it promises. The risks—to societies, to security, and to our species—are too high, and the forces driving AI forward are not the forces that will deliver its benefits," said Maria Ressa, a panel's co-chair and Nobel Peace Prize-winning Filipino-American journalist.
Guterres, whose term ends this year, similarly stressed the need for urgent action on a global scale. He said that the "single lesson" he wanted to highlight from the multifaceted report is that "the more AI advances without shared rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome. So my message to governments is simple: Do not wait."
"Next week in Geneva, the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance will begin to turn science into shared action—with every nation at the same table," he said. "I look forward to joining member states there to help carry this work forward. And soon, I will set out proposals to help countries build the capacity to adequately deal with this technology—and share in its rewards."
Guterres' Wednesday comments came after he publicly took aim at artificial intelligence companies last week, proposing the AI Environmental Transparency Initiative during London Climate Action Week, as the second heatwave in as many months scorched the United Kingdom and various other European countries, killing at least hundreds of people.
"I am calling on every major AI company to measure and publicly disclose the full environmental impact of its systems—carbon, water, and land footprints—and to commit to power every data center with renewable energy by 2030," he declared. "No more hidden costs. No more shifting the burden onto those least able to bear it."
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