#190 - Sam Lyman - China’s Secret War on American AI

**Peter McCormack** (0:00)
You told me that China is deliberately sabotaging the US buildout of AI.

**Sam Lyman** (0:05)
100%. China intuitively knows that whoever wins AI will more or less control the world. Neville Roy Singham is, for all intents and purposes, a modern-day Lenin. He's actually pumped $278 million.
What? Yeah. $278 million into the US non-profit ecosystem. They've been able to successfully stall about $24 billion in AI buildout. Communism is back. It's here.

**Peter McCormack** (0:32)
It feels like you've got so many enemies within in the US right now.

**Sam Lyman** (0:36)
It's either Chinese AI or American AI.

**Peter McCormack** (0:38)
This is a battle America can't lose.

**Sam Lyman** (0:40)
100%.

**Peter McCormack** (0:42)
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Sam, how are you?

**Sam Lyman** (1:08)
Good. How are you doing, Peter?

**Peter McCormack** (1:09)
Good. We sat down and had a chat yesterday and you told me that China is deliberately sabotaging the US buildout of AI.

**Sam Lyman** (1:18)
100 percent.

**Peter McCormack** (1:19)
What is going on? Tell me, tell us what's going on here.

**Sam Lyman** (1:22)
Yeah. There's a lot of different vectors of attack here. So let's start with the first one that's most in the news recently. OpenAI released a report just a couple of weeks ago that documented a Chinese bot campaign against AI. So what Chinese operators did was they used ChatGPT to set up a social media campaign that was designed to sow doubt and fear and anger towards data center build out here in the United States. They found out in this report that they had created their own memes.
The memes are pretty cringy to be honest, but they have all the hallmarks of ChatGPT Slop. So you're looking for good meme making, don't go to China. But they created these memes, they created a bunch of posts. Some of them got tens of thousands of views about why the data center build out is bad in the United States, how it's harming communities supposedly, how it's guzzling up water consumption and using a lot of electricity. And the whole point of this campaign was to increase anger and division amongst the American populace about AI and data centers in particular.

**Peter McCormack** (2:23)
And that is happening, we're seeing these messages land.

**Sam Lyman** (2:25)
Yeah, that's happening. And what was interesting about the ChatGPT report was that OpenAI concluded that this particular campaign didn't have a huge impact, it didn't really escape containment, but it's the only campaign that we've been able to identify so far. It raises the question, what other campaigns have been waged by China that we just haven't been able to identify yet? So that's just one vector of attack. The other vector of attack is the one we've been following really closely here at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and that comes from a man named Neville Roy Singham. Neville Roy Singham is, for all intents and purposes, a modern day Lenin. I say that descriptively because I think he himself would actually be flattered by that comparison.
He's been a subject of FBI interest since 1974 He's a self-identified Maoist.
He's unapologetic about his Marxism, and he recently decamped to Shanghai a little over eight years ago in order to set up base there. From Shanghai, he's a multimillionaire. He's about worth over $700 billion, and he's used that money to funnel left-wing socialist causes here in the United States, which most recently has focused specifically on attacking data centers, attacking AI.

**Peter McCormack** (3:34)
All right. Okay. A lot to unpack here. Look, the AI revolution has been totally fascinating. I think we're all fascinated by it and we're all using it.
There's a lot of questions about what it means for society, what it's going to mean for jobs, what it means for if and when we hit superintelligence. There's a lot going on here, but there's clearly a competition going on. Because if you look historically, any revolution, there's a competition and the US has been pretty good at winning most of those races competitively in the economic market. But there's something different with AI, right? It feels like you're more than just winning an economic advantage here. You're trying to win, in some ways, control of the world. So China has been pretty good over the last few decades of slowly imprinting themselves on the world economically, politically, militarily in a weird, quiet way.