Foreign billionaires, fake activists, and the fight over American AI: Sam Lyman in conversation with Jordan Schachtel.

In an interview with The Dossier news channel, guest Sam Lyman of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, warns China’s Communist Party is waging an indirect information and influence campaign to sabotage America’s AI expansion.

The anti-data-center movement, says Lyman, is not merely an environmental or local political issue, but part of a larger strategic battlefield in which China seeks to weaken America’s AI capabilities from within by exploiting democratic activism, regulatory friction, and public fear in order to slow the construction of the U.S. data centers needed to win the AI race.

Describing data centers as the “enriched uranium” of the AI era, Lyman unpacks the efforts of pro-CCP influence operations in the United States to amplify anti-data-center sentiment. He singles out tech mogul turned political financier, Neville Roy Singham, and organizations allegedly connected to his activist network, including groups accused of collaborating with Chinese state media that echo Beijing’s narratives. These networks, claims Lyman, have been leveraged to promote fears about AI, energy consumption, water use, surveillance, and environmental damage in order to generate political resistance against American AI infrastructure—the physical capacity required to train and operate advanced AI systems. If America cannot rapidly build massive computer capacity, China gains an opening to dominate AI globally.

At the heart of the issue is a broader geopolitical warning: whoever wins the AI race will shape the world’s future information ecosystem. Lyman highlights the fundamental differences between the U.S. and China models competing for dominance as open expression and decentralized innovation (in the case of the U.S.), while the CCP represents censorship, centralized control, and state-managed information. He notes that China’s AI strategy is especially problematic because it exports cheap or open-source AI models trained on heavily censored information that suppresses criticism of the Chinese regime.

This interview is available to watch at The Dossier’s Substack here.

Sam Lyman is the former senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Bessent. His previous role as public policy director at Riot Platforms, a leading digital assets and AI infrastructure company, provided firsthand experience of how opposition to U.S. build-out impacts the country’s lead in the AI race.