China is Infiltrating the Anti-AI Movement

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Sen. Bernie Sanders, an 84-year-old socialist politician whose previous position on technology was that he had no apps on his phone, didn’t seem to recognize the names of major platforms, and had a woman named ‘Melissa’ to tell him what he was doing, is suddenly interested in AI.

Anyone who thought that Bernie’s sudden hostility to AI was organic was disabused of the notion when the politician announced an event at the U.S. Capitol to discuss the “need for international cooperation” on AI featuring two Chinese scientists along with two members of the Future of Life Institute which has developed a growing interest in China’s role in AI.

While there are legitimate concerns about the impact of AI, the Sanders event is raising concerns that China is infiltrating the anti-AI movement, coordinating with AI critics and pushing for an ‘international governance’ model that would allow the regime to limit AI development by American companies while providing advantages to China’s domestic AI industry.

Of the Chinese half of the Sanders session, Zeng Yi is the dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, and promoted China’s “Global Artificial Intelligence Governance Initiative”, and Xue Lan, who chairs China’s national expert committee for AI governance, has been advocating for China’s access to the International Network of AI Safety Institutes of free nations which had included America, as well as European and Asian nations, including Japan and South Korea, but not China due to concerns about its systemic theft and manipulation.

The Sanders session promotes a Chinese role in AI governance even as a new administration memo accuses Chinese companies of “deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns” to steal AI models.

But it’s the other half of the AI session that raises even more questions about China’s ability to co-opt western critics of AI. Although the Sanders RSVP does not mention it, Max Tegmark, a physicist, is the president and a board member of the Future of Life Institute along with his wife Meia Chita-Tegmark, who has degrees in education and psychology, who is listed as the co-founder of the ‘institute’, while David Krueger, the second attendee, is also linked to it.

While the Future of Life Institute was backed in the past by prominent figures including Elon Musk, it has more recently served into problematic territory. In 2025, it issued a PhD fellowship proposal for US-China AI governance urging “global governance” to reduce “the risks associated with a US-China AI competition” and the deployment of advanced AI systems.

This closely mirrors Chinese rhetoric warning against an AI ‘arms race’ and urging a partnership to control AI. Like past arms agreements, this will be yet another one way partnership that risks allowing China access to American AI developments and the ability to control the rate of development even while China misstates, conceals and deceives about its AI progress.

It would also allow China to restrict AI weapons development by the United States while freeing China to conduct whatever secret weapons development it pleases until it has its ‘Manhattan Project’ moment and achieves military superiority over the United States of America.

In 2024, Tegmark predicted that the American and Chinese governments would create a joint set of AI standards and enforce them on the world.

What’s China’s position on the Future of Life Institute? CGTN, China’s state media under the control of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party promoted a Future of Life Institute claim that AI companies were failing to maintain safety standards.

The Chinese government has been using similar alarmism to advance its program of global governance. “If we allow this reckless competition among countries to continue,” Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang warned last year at the World Economic Forum, disaster would follow. “We stand ready, under the framework of the United Nations and its core, to actively participate in including all the relevant international organizations and all countries to discuss the formulation of robust rules.”

Is China about to stop competing? Unlikely. The calls for a ‘multipolar world’ lately being broadcast by social media influencers and politicians at all points of the political spectrum, from Tucker Carlson to Bernie Sanders, serve its interests by weakening the United States, and creating opportunities for a pathway to unfettered dominance by Chinese companies.

China has never abided by the rules of the international community and it won’t start now.

Sen. Bernie Sanders promoted China’s AI campaign by claiming that “Artificial intelligence is coming for the working class”, warning that Elon Musk is building “robots” that “will displace workers in healthcare, grocery stores, the hospitality industry, call centers and every other part of our economy.” Why a call center would need robots, Sanders didn’t bother to explain.

At a rally with SEIU union employees, Sanders claimed that “AI oligarchs want to replace human workers.”

But if Sen. Sanders is really worried about the impact of AI on the working class, why is his signature Capitol Hill event a call for bringing China into the system of global AI governance?

None of that has anything to do with the ‘working class’ or robots running grocery stores.

Embedding China in global AI governance or putting American companies under the control of the United Nations would do nothing to help the ‘working class’, it would instead cripple any potential military applications, limit the rate of American development, and reward ‘rule breaking’ nations like China for flouting the same rules that its leaders are trying to foist on everyone else.

China wants veto power over American AI development, not because it’s interested in protecting working class jobs, but because it wants to leap ahead. And Sen. Sanders is helping China.

Talk of the working class being replaced by robots appears to be cover for a foreign influence campaign aimed at restricting American AI development in order to give China an advantage.

There are reasonable concerns to be raised about AI, but much as Chinese organizations infiltrated the environmental movement and Soviet organizations infiltrated the anti-nuclear movement, Americans should be concerned about who is infiltrating the anti-AI movement.