What's behind the huge rise of anti AI & pro China sentiment?

In the past 10 months, three major shifts have happened in USA in regards to AI. First, people are protesting both data centers and AI, which in their minds tie together. Two, people are now preferring the Chinese AI models over the U.S.-based AI models. And three, the government, as well as the major AI companies based out of the U.S., are claiming that the Chinese-based companies are now distilling the U.S.-based models to create their own new open source models, and that's where the popularity seems to be coming from. However, I saw some patterns emerging, so I decided to take a deep dive into this to see how organic all of this sentiment was, and the results might surprise you. As that intro suggested, it seems that there is a 10-month or more propaganda campaign turning the Western sentiment or the U.S.-based sentiment away from not only the U.S.-based AI companies, but against AI in general and data center expansion in general, and I'm going to show you some evidence to back that up. Let me pause for a second. Who am I, and why do I care about these things, and why should I even be talking about this? Well, first, I've worked in technology for 25 years. Right now, I'm a senior cloud engineer. I'm also an AI researcher and AI educator. I'm certified in generative AI, and I spend a lot of time paying attention to things that are happening in the realm of AI. Aside from that, years ago, I used to write technology articles for the Epoch Times, as well as many other projects related to journalism and also related to activism years ago. So, I'm used to digging into topics, and I'm used to pattern recognition when I see things catching on with people on social media as far as buzz topics and things of that nature. So, when I saw things starting to happen, I paid attention to it closely. This particular video is a Ganjing World exclusive, meaning I'm going to upload it only to Ganjing World for now. If it ends up on other platforms, that's going to happen at a later date, but I felt this was the correct platform for it. And I sort of rushed to get this video out because I felt the topic and the content was important enough to not wait for all the research to come in. I'm going to be doing more videos later digging into this even deeper than today's video. And if you'll excuse me, I will be referencing my notes during this video. I just want to make sure I know what I'm talking about and get all the facts right as I go along. Firstly, June 10, 2026, OpenAI bans two China-based covert operations that use ChatGPT to generate content. Two of the names that they described, one was the data center bandwagon and the other one was tech and tariffs. Now, what OpenAI saw is they saw all the chat messages because OpenAI reads your chat messages. They saw everything that they were doing and their system sort of flagged it, so they paid attention to it closely. Here's the article from OpenAI where it says the PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the U.S. They're basically fueling the AI debates in the U.S. PRC means People's Republic of China. And they also published this PDF, which actually goes into great detail and gives some great examples. So what happened is these groups posed as real news outlets, posting tweets and posting other posts on social media with these cartoons that were basically propaganda, turning people's sentiment away from AI, away from data centers, basically accusing these AI data centers of causing price hikes in the electrical grid of the United States. And they didn't just post once or twice. They kept posting and kept posting and kept posting. This type of behavior is designed to change opinions. And these cartoons, if you know the history of cartoons, they began as a propaganda or political machine, a way to influence people in a simplified fashion. And it wasn't just one or two types of posts. They kept going with different types of posts that showed all different ways of basically convincing people that AI was sucking up the entire electrical grid and was causing everybody's electrical prices to increase and more or less get people really angry and upset with the AI companies and the companies that are building data centers. The other thing they focused on was the tech and tariffs campaign. This was a huge commentary because as we all know, Trump put tariffs on just about every type of import from just about every type of country when he first got into office. And that stayed for a long time and it continues to this day. Of course, China did not accept that. And this was apparently one of their moves to counter that, is to turn U.S. sentiment away from this. And one of the most telling aspects of this, and it's laid out in OpenAI's report, it says that these were not lone trolls. These were not just organic people. It says OpenAI assessed operators were a private Chinese tech company social media team working for provincial government clients. So OpenAI was able to tie these to government bodies of China. And they went on this huge campaign about PJM capacity auction prices. If you don't know, PJM is the largest power grid supplier in the United States. They are responsible for delivering the energy to just about everywhere in the United States, or at least a large portion of the United States. And it wasn't just on sites like X. It was everywhere. And it didn't just come from China. That's the interesting part. It came from also Russia and Iran. But as many of you may know, the relations between Russia and China are very strong. The relations between Iran and China are very strong. And not only do Russia and Iran have expats living in China, but China has expats living in Russia and Iran. And from all these countries, it was hundreds of times over the six-month period that we're discussing, and nearly at least four a day, but it was probably much more than four a day. But they could verify at least four a day. And then those would get retweeted and retalked about and commented on and shared. Now, another thing, aside from pushing out propaganda against data centers, against AI in general, there was a whole other campaign to get people to prefer the Chinese AI models, which appears to be in its highest point right now in social media, especially with what just happened with Kimi and with GLM. And then on July 17, Xi Jinping in Shanghai held a conference inviting 29 countries into this talk, basically creating a world AI conference where they would talk about what the future of AI would be and how people would share technologies and things related to that. Now, I did a post on TikTok about this, and a lot of people commented, well, on that entire list, aside from China, most of those countries were completely irrelevant when we're discussing AI. And there was a lot of truth to that. So it appears that this was more PR than it was anything else. And the organization that was announced during this conference was the WICO, the World AI Cooperation Organization. Some of the countries present in this conference were Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, Pakistan, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and many countries from Africa. And of course, there was zero Western-aligned countries there. And then President Xi announced that there are 5,000 AI training slots for developing nations. So this conference, nothing was actually achieved. It was more about standing in front of the camera and showing to the world what the future plans are for AI. And it appears, of course, I'm not going to speculate heavily on the motive, but it appears to be completely public relations oriented. And in one New York Times article, Kyle Chan was quoted as saying, open source serves China's twin goals of bolstering its image as an inclusive AI leader and reducing global reliance on American AI. So it seems that the soft power frame is deliberate here, it seems. According to them, not according to me. And of course, as many of us know, the Chinese-based models are cheaper. Their economy can support lower prices. So of course, it's going to be very attractive to people who are not happy with paying high prices for AI. And not only this, if you are to browse on X right now, you will see a large number of people pushing really hard, repeating the same scripts of how wonderful the Chinese AI models are and how terrible the United States is. And they all use the exact same verbiage, the exact same wording. I'm not going to present examples for the sake of not making this video too long, but in one of my future videos, they will probably be there. And then we shift to the distillation topic. So Anthropic has accused Alibaba of distillation. In June 2026, Anthropic tells the U.S. Senate that Alibaba's Quinn Lab ran the largest known distillation attack on a commercial model. 2,500 fake accounts had 28.8 million exchanges with Claude over 44 days. That's enormous. That's an entire bot army. And the purpose was to train Quinn to match Anthropic's frontier model on coding, reasoning, and cybersecurity. The result of this is the U.S. Treasury Secretary has threatened sanctions on China AI firms. Open source is not open season on American IP. It was a quote from him. And then to dive a little bit deeper, let's keep going with this. Leaked internal documents, 399 pages from a Chinese Academy of Sciences spinoff first reported by the New York Times and Vanderbilt in August of 2025. So we're going back. I mentioned 10 months. We're going back. Describe a turnkey AI propaganda system. Auto-detect regional political trends, select targets, generate tailored content, deliver via realistic fake accounts. Its U.S. targets include every member of Congress, 4,000-plus Trump supporters, 5,000 journalists, and 20,000 companies. So this was a huge campaign even back then. And then Meta calls spamouflage, which is linked to Chinese law enforcement, the largest covert influence operation ever discovered. Thousands of accounts across 50-plus platforms since 2017. So this is not new. We are just seeing the latest iteration of all this. So if we keep digging, we keep uncovering layers of it similar to an onion. And then Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center documented CCP-linked actors using AI-generated content across 31 languages. So Microsoft is paying attention to, and they've documented this, and they've published it. So this type of content, this type of campaign goes back some time. I'm just reinforcing what I'm talking about with some evidence. And now what we're seeing is the U.S. government is finally taking this seriously, and they're treating this as a real threat. There's a lot of sentiment against what the U.S. government is doing because people have been influenced to the point where they now trust anything coming out of China before they trust anything coming out of the United States. That includes the news. That includes any government announcements. And this is, from what I can tell from all the evidence that I'm gathering, this is not accidental. This is on purpose. And this was the purpose of all these campaigns all along. My research is far from complete. I wanted to get this video out today while I'm researching this to raise awareness, but I will be digging deeper into this. I will be taking my time and being more articulate with what I found. But hopefully this is a good introductory video for the topic itself, for the conversations that we should be having. So there's three basic things happening. It appears that actors from China, from Russia, from Iran are trying to get the USA to basically protest AI and data center development to the point where it freezes. And during this, it appears this is a great opportunity for the China-based AI companies to step in and take over that market. Of course, a lot of this that I'm saying is a mixture of what I'm interpreting from all these articles and documents and speculation. So it's a healthy level of speculation. As mentioned not long ago, I will continue to dig into this and I will present my findings then. For now, take this as you will. I've you references and I will be including links at the bottom of this video.