The Campaign to Kill American AI Runs Through San Francisco | Garry's List

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p]:m-0">The movement opposing data centers looks like grassroots environmentalism. But a federal grand jury and two new research reports show it is also a coordinated foreign influence operation, with documented nodes in the Mission District, Oakland, and a San Francisco foundation boardroom.

Neville Roy Singham lives in Shanghai. His office once displayed a banner reading “Always Follow the Party” and a plate depicting Xi Jinping. He attended a Chinese Communist Party workshop on promoting the party internationally. He has channeled more than $285 million into a network of U.S. nonprofits that a federal grand jury is now investigating for wire fraud, bank fraud, and possible money laundering.

His wife was in Oakland in February, organizing to stop American AI data centers.

That connection is not a coincidence. It is, according to two new Bitcoin Policy Institute reports and a federal investigation, a coordinated foreign influence operation. And some of its most active nodes are in the Bay Area.

The choice the United States faces on artificial intelligence is not AI vs. no AI. It is American AI or Chinese AI. The White House’s AI Action Plan states it directly: whoever builds the largest AI ecosystem will set global AI standards and reap the economic and military benefits. China has responded by subsidizing up to half the energy costs of its own AI data center operators while running English-language state media campaigns warning American consumers that U.S. data centers are raising their electricity bills.

The AI doomerism movement — the moratoriums, the pause demands, the packed city council chambers in Monterey Park and Pittsburg and Gilroy — has been covered largely as organic civic concern. BPI’s Part I and Part II reports show that running parallel to those authentic concerns is something else: a coordinated foreign-funded operation producing the exact policy outcomes — data center moratoria, zoning rejections, withdrawn permits — that slow the American AI buildout.

BPI’s Part II, authored by BPI head of research Sam Lyman, documents 21 campaigns by the Party for Socialism and Liberation — a Marxist-Leninist organization whose senior leadership doubles as executive staff at Singham-funded nonprofits — that delayed, blocked, or forced the withdrawal of approximately $23.6 billion in AI data center investment across 14 states. BPI’s Part I documented three foreign vectors behind the campaign: Chinese state media, the Singham nonprofit network, and foreign-billionaire charitable vehicles funneling more than $2 billion into U.S. advocacy infrastructure.

California, the state that produces most of that AI, is also where three of the network’s most active nodes operate.

The Mission Street Address

At 2969 Mission Street in San Francisco, two organizations share a building: the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s Mission Liberation Center, and the ANSWER Coalition’s San Francisco chapter office.

PSL’s Liberation Centers are, in BPI’s Part II’s framing, the network’s ground-level mobilization infrastructure; the mechanism that converts national messaging about “data centers” into packed city council chambers and withdrawn development permits. There are at least 28 of them across the country. One is in the Mission District.

ANSWER’s alignment with the Singham network is documented. Three days after the New York Times published its 2023 investigation into Singham’s global propaganda operation, ANSWER co-signed a coalition letter defending the network. China’s state news agency Xinhua amplified that letter three days later, naming ANSWER among the signatories.

While a direct Singham-to-ANSWER funding line has not been established in published primary reporting, BPI’s reports strongly suggest it — documenting ideological alignment, shared PSL-Singham leadership structures, and the Xinhua letter.

CodePink’s Bay Area Chapter

The cleaner Singham link in California runs through an organization called CodePink. CodePink was co-founded by Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin. Evans is Singham’s wife — they married in February 2017 off Runaway Bay, Jamaica, shortly after he sold his software consultancy Thoughtworks to private equity for a reported $785 million. Benjamin co-founded the San Francisco-based Global Exchange in 1988 and maintains dual DC/SF residency.

The New York Times’s 2023 investigation documented that roughly a quarter of CodePink’s donations — more than $1.4 million — have come from two groups linked to Mr. Singham since 2017, primarily routed through a Goldman Sachs-affiliated donor-advised fund that was subsequently terminated. A separate foundation, the Benjamin Fund (now renamed Arc of Justice), provided CodePink more than $1.1 million since 2016, including $355,350 in 2022 alone, per the foundation’s Form 990-PF on ProPublica (EIN 84-1618483). Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley...