How the Strategy Works

OpenAI itself said it had found no evidence that the campaign had gained meaningful traction in public debate. At least for now, it has not achieved its intended effect. Nevertheless, the effort is revealing. China-linked actors appear to be testing narratives at a vulnerable point in the American AI strategy.

Electricity costs, infrastructure and local acceptance are at the center of this effort. What can be said is that China-linked actors are drawing on new and existing narratives in the West to intensify fears of AI where they already exist. They do not create these fears from nothing. They exploit genuine conflicts. Their approach can be examined on three levels.

The first level is the evidence itself. OpenAI describes accounts that generated content claiming that AI data centers were driving up electricity prices. The texts and images were intended to create the impression that ordinary families were footing the bill for the energy demands of large technology companies. This narrative is politically effective because it draws on existing concerns.

Data centers require electricity, cooling, land, power grids and capital. In its report Energy and AI, the International Energy Agency states that electricity demand from data centers is rising substantially and that AI is accelerating the trend. This makes the narrative plausible. Propaganda is strongest when it is not entirely false.

It takes a genuine problem, shifts the emphasis and combines it with mistrust. The question of how data centers should be connected to the grid becomes a narrative in which American AI drives up citizens’ electricity bills. Local infrastructure policy becomes a culture war against AI.

The second level is the question of cui bono. Who benefits if the West retreats from AI? A slowdown in American AI development would be strategically valuable to China. The Chinese government has sought global leadership in artificial intelligence for years. In 2017, China’s State Council published a development plan aimed at making the country a leading global center for AI innovation by 2030.

AI is not merely a combination of hardware and software. It is an industrial foundation. Whoever controls AI controls data centers, semiconductor production, power grids, cloud infrastructure, data flows, military applications, research and, not least, productivity in industrial manufacturing.

If permits stall in the United States, electricity prices become politically explosive, local protests escalate and data centers become an election issue. China gains time. It does not have to stop American AI completely. It is enough to make its competitors’ models more expensive, slower and more socially contentious.

The third level consists of historical parallels. The cases are not identical, but they reveal a recurring method. Anyone seeking to understand it must return to Cold War Germany and examine the magazine konkret and the peace and anti-nuclear power movements.

Konkret grew out of the Studentenkurier, a magazine launched in 1955 by journalist and publisher Klaus Rainer Röhl and others following a decision by the Central Council of East Germany’s Free German Youth. It was largely financed from East Germany, and Röhl later spoke of receiving instructions from Communist Party of Germany officials.

An increasingly irrational fear of nuclear power took hold in Germany during the 1970s. The Eastern Bloc helped to inflame it. Here, too, propaganda exploited existing uncertainty. The memory of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was still fresh.

Nuclear energy is neither risk-free nor harmless, but it can be managed safely. A vague sense of danger among the population played into the hands of campaigners against nuclear power.

In particular, the Eastern Bloc used its influence on West Germany’s peace and environmental movements to amplify existing fears of nuclear war, rearmament and large-scale technology. The contrast became especially striking after German reunification. In the eastern states that had once made up East Germany, there was no significant fear of or resistance to nuclear power.

The Propaganda of Fear

The same pattern appears in Operation INFEKTION, a disinformation campaign in which Soviet intelligence services spread the false claim that AIDS had originated in an American biological weapons laboratory. Once again, a genuine fear of disease, research and military technology was turned into an anti-American narrative.

The method later resurfaced in debates about energy and science. Russian state media gave conspicuously negative coverage to genetic engineering in agriculture. A study of RT and Sputnik concluded that their coverage of genetically modified organisms fitted the profile of Russian information warfare.

There were also repeated suspicions that Russia had used Western environmental arguments against fracking to discredit energy projects capable of reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.

Not every criticism of advanced technology is directed from abroad. A more precise conclusion is that a strategic adversary does not have to invent every fear. It can exploit existing anxieties and intensify social conflicts by spreading mistrust and increasing the political cost of a project.

Persistent opposition eventually led Germany to stop building nuclear power plants of its own, although the country remained a technological leader in the field for many years. Germany also built nuclear power plants for numerous other countries.

Why AI Is Vulnerable

AI offers fertile ground for such tactics. The technology promises greater productivity, advances in research, new forms of medicine, military strength and faster industrial development.

At the same time, it touches on anxieties that resonate strongly in Western societies: job losses, surveillance, disinformation, copyright, concentrations of power, electricity prices and environmental damage. These concerns can be assembled into a powerful narrative.

The resulting message is that AI benefits corporations, harms citizens and threatens democracy. A counterstrategy must therefore do more than simply expose individual campaigns. Labeling something Chinese propaganda is not enough; critics will quickly dismiss such claims as conspiracy theories. The best strategy is transparency.

Governments and companies must disclose how much electricity data centers require, where that electricity comes from, what costs arise and who benefits locally. A second element is to change the narrative around energy. AI needs energy. This must not be concealed. But energy consumption is not automatically a moral failing.

Progress Is Driven by Energy

On the contrary, every major technological advance in history has been driven by energy and has ultimately increased efficiency. The steam engine, electrification, the chemical industry, railways, computers, the internet and modern medicine all required more energy while allowing it to be used more efficiently.

The automobile offers one example. Some everyday cars can now travel 100 km on four liters of fuel or less. Modern cars tend to use less fuel than their 1970s counterparts while offering far greater performance, safety and comfort.

A refrigerator from the 1950s consumed six to ten times as much energy as a modern appliance, which can also keep vegetables at 0C. This means dramatically lower energy consumption combined with noticeably greater convenience.

AI will become more efficient in part by advancing technologies that have previously remained beyond reach. AI may not build a fusion reactor, as some advocates like to claim. But it could help bridge a crucial gap that has held nuclear fusion back for decades: integrating physics, materials science, real-time control and industrial scaling. Research in this field already exists.

AI Is Not an Imposition

The real counterstrategy, therefore, is for the West to stop presenting AI as an imposition. The alternative to Western AI is not a world without AI. It is foreign AI. If the United States and Europe slow down out of fear, the technology will not disappear. It will be developed elsewhere.

Others will then build the models, set the standards, control the infrastructure and shape the rules governing data protection, freedom of speech, surveillance and military use.

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This is the blind spot in many Western debates. They treat AI as though moral hesitation could somehow make it disappear. But China, other authoritarian states and private centers of power beyond democratic control will not wait for Western societies to resolve their concerns.

An AI strategy rooted in freedom must therefore do two things: take the risks seriously and continue building AI.

Who Will Control AI?

There are credible indications that China-linked actors are testing narratives against American AI infrastructure. China would derive a clear strategic benefit if these narratives succeeded. History also offers examples of geopolitical adversaries amplifying genuine Western fears for similar purposes.

The counterstrategy is to acknowledge genuine problems, expose propaganda, expand energy supplies where necessary, build local support and understand AI as a question of freedom and sovereignty.

The decisive question is not whether AI carries risks. It is who develops the technology, who controls it and under what rules it enters the world.

What applies to every market also applies to AI. Within a sound regulatory framework, scarce resources are allocated optimally. This allows an important technology to develop as freely as possible while remaining subject to appropriate control.