The Campaign to Kill American AI Runs Through San Francisco | Garry Tan, Garry's List
How a web of foreign money, from Shanghai to Geneva, found its way into Bay Area nonprofits now driving the movement to block American AI.
TL;DR
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.
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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a coordinated foreign-funded operation producing the exact policy outcomes — data center moratoria, zoning rejections, withdrawn permits — that slow the American AI buildout.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 wrote to the DOJ in April 2025 asking it to assess whether CodePink must register as a foreign agent, citing evidence it “has been funded and influenced by Mr. Singham and the communist Chinese government, both of which are foreign principals.”
CodePink maintains an active Bay Area chapter and a Los Angeles regional office at 2010 Linden Avenue in Venice. In January 2026, it published “The War Intervention: AI, Data Centers, and the Environment,” framing data center opposition as an anti-militarism cause. In February 2026, Evans led a Bay Area delegation to the Sierra Club’s Oakland headquarters at 2101 Webster Street to deliver a petition pushing the organization to formally oppose AI data centers.
That is the operational picture in this region: Singham’s wife, running an organization that received more than $1.4 million from Singham-linked sources and faces a Senate Judiciary FARA inquiry, organizing in Oakland to recruit a 3.5-million-member environmental institution into a campaign that federal prosecutors are now examining for financial crimes.
The San Francisco Foundation With a Tsinghua Co-Author
Singham’s network is one vector into California. A second runs through foreign-billionaire charitable vehicles, with a clear structural hub in San Francisco and China-alignment that goes beyond ideological sympathy.
BPI’s research pinpointed the ClimateWorks Foundation, headquartered in San Francisco, as a critical pass-through in the Oak Foundation’s efforts to “green” China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Oak Foundation is legally domiciled in Geneva, Switzerland (58 Avenue Louis Casaï), controlled by the family of British billionaire Alan Parker. Oak has pledged up to $75 million over five years to ClimateWorks. Kristian Parker — Alan Parker’s son, Oak Foundation’s vice chair and environmental program director — sits on the ClimateWorks board. That board seat is the direct institutional link between a Swiss-domiciled British billionaire’s foundation and a San Francisco 501©(3).
In September 2019, ClimateWorks co-published a report titled “Decarbonizing the Belt and Road Initiative: A Green Finance Roadmap” with Vivid Economics (UK) and Tsinghua University’s Center for Finance and Development, authored by Dr. Ma Jun and Dr. Simon Zadek. BPI’s Part I flags this as the analytical embodiment of Oak’s China-aligned environmental program. A San Francisco foundation receiving tens of millions from a Swiss-held British family fund was co-authoring policy frameworks for China’s flagship foreign policy initiative with a Tsinghua University research center.
From its San Francisco headquarters, ClimateWorks channels Oak money into the California environmental organizations at the forefront of the anti-data-center campaign. The downstream recipients: the Energy Foundation (SF, at least $2.2 million in confirmed direct Oak grants), the Sierra Club Foundation (Oakland), GAIA — the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (Berkeley, at least $2.4 million in confirmed direct Oak grants per InfluenceWatch) — and https://t.co/fkEL07ITH9’s national operation, including three California chapters that are direct signatories to the December 8, 2025 Food & Water Watch coalition letter calling for a federal data center moratorium: 350 Bay Area Action, SanDiego350, and SoCal 350.
Also on that December 2025 letter is MediaJustice (Oakland), which published “The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers Toolkit” in January 2026. MediaJustice’s public funder disclosures list the New Venture Fund as a direct funder — a documented recipient of money from Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss’s charitable vehicles. BPI’s Part I documents that Wyss-aligned entities have directed millions into the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund since 2016.
A Third Foreign Vector: The Estonian Billionaire
The anti-AI campaign running through California is not exclusively a CCP-adjacent story. There’s also a separate current.
The Survival and Flourishing Fund, controlled by Jaan Tallinn — the Estonian-born co-founder of Skype — is a documented funder of Bay Area AI-safety organizations including the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley and the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco. In March 2026, groups in this orbit organized a “Stop the AI Race” rally in San Francisco outside the offices of Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI.
The politics here are distinct from the PSL or CodePink. But BPI’s Part I makes the point explicitly: multiple foreign-tied funding streams, from distinct political traditions, are all pointed at the same U.S. policy target. The Chinese government subsidizes its own AI buildout while multiple foreign-funded networks converge on the same aim: slow the American AI buildout down.
The Mainstream Credibility Problem
On June 1, 2026, approximately 700 activists gathered in San Francisco for a conference organized by the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, a Marxist-Leninist network with ties to the PSL and ANSWER. The conference ended with a march targeting OpenAI and Scale AI headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
One of the speakers was Mike Casey, President of the San Francisco Labor Council.
Casey’s appearance does not mean he knew about or endorsed the Singham network’s funding structures. He may have understood it as an antiwar and labor platform. But it illustrates what BPI’s Part II describes as the campaign’s central operating logic: a foreign-linked network uses genuine local concerns to build coalitions with mainstream institutions, lending credibility to a movement that federal prosecutors are now scrutinizing. That is how a Marxist-Leninist international conference targeting OpenAI and Scale AI ends up with the San Francisco Labor Council president on its platform.
Casey has not publicly addressed his appearance at the conference.
What California Has Already Lost
In June 2026, voters in Monterey Park became the first in the country to permanently ban data centers by public vote. Eighty-six percent voted yes. BPI’s Part II lists Monterey Park as one of its 21 documented case studies. Across the Bay Area, Pittsburg, Oakley, and Gilroy are fighting data center projects using a playbook whose language tracks closely to what BPI documents as the Singham network’s domestic content operation.
Not every local opponent is connected to this network. BPI says so explicitly. So does this piece.
But the AI infrastructure California is blocking is the compute layer that underpins the next decade of economic growth, scientific discovery, and American technological leadership. Every data center that doesn’t get built in Gilroy or Pittsburg is capacity that doesn’t exist — models that are slower, a race that gets closer, a country that subsidizes its own buildout while we block ours. BPI’s Part II puts the national total at $23.6 billion in blocked or delayed investment across 14 states. A federal grand jury is now examining who paid for the campaign that produced it.
The campaign to kill American AI runs through San Francisco. It also runs through Shanghai. The people funding it are not worried about your electricity bill. They are worried about who wins the AI race, and they have built some of their most effective infrastructure for stopping America just a few miles from the labs racing to win it.
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