Far-left senator Bernie Sanders is working with individuals closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party in his crusade against artificial intelligence.
Sanders on Wednesday evening will sit down with Chinese nationals Xue Lan, a professor at the CCP-funded Tsinghua University, and Zeng Yi, the dean of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance. The event is slated to examine the “existential threat” posed by AI and the need for international cooperation to regulate it.
The Tsinghua University is China’s top engineering school and works hand in hand with the Chinese government and military. The university has been linked to the CCP’s cyber-espionage campaigns targeting the United States — the university owns companies and projects tied to Beijing’s priorities to achieve technological breakthroughs.
In 2018, Chinese cyber actors targeted Alaskan networks and organizations at the center of trade negotiations with the Alaska state government. The surveillance attacks occurred before, during, and after the negotiations between China and the governor. The United States is a top study abroad destination for the highly skilled student engineers whose top employers after university are Nvidia’s Chinese rival Huawei, the State Grid Corporation of China, and China’s Aerospace, Science, and Technology Corporation.
Yi, of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance, is an advocate of scaling back AI, warning of environmental concerns that “fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable.” He argues AI is driving mass surveillance and discrimination.
The campaign from Sanders and his Chinese allies to scale back AI comes as President Donald Trump pushes to make sure the United States stays at the front of the AI race. Trump launched his “American AI Action Plan” in July 2025, which made a commitment to AI development, absent onerous regulation and infrastructure inhibitions. Sanders’ event advocates for the opposite.
The event has been criticized by prominent voices in the American tech industry, such as Marc Andreessen, who called the involvement of China “concerning.” There have been warnings from the tech industry that the American left will be China’s only hope to leapfrog America.
Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of the defense giant Palantir, said China is desperate to catch up with the United States in the AI fight.
“The United States has opened a significant civilizational lead versus China when it comes to the defense and economic situation around Artificial Intelligence,” Lonsdale said, warning that China is “desperate to use the left” to set America back.
He said it’s difficult to tell whether the left is on China’s side or just naive.
“CCP leadership encourages regressive socialist views in the United States of America, in [a] desperate attempt to slow adversaries’ economic and military advantage.”
Sanders leads the Left’s campaign against AI, proposing an AI moratorium in December. He also frequently voices concern over the technology turning on humans.
“If AI becomes smarter than human beings, we could lose control over this revolutionary technology and AI could turn against the human race with cataclysmic consequences,” he said.
Trump’s AI czar David Sacks argues the opposite. “As I’ve said many times before, the biggest risk of AI isn’t James Cameron’s The Terminator, it’s George Orwell’s 1984,” he wrote in an X post.
Sacks says the AI safety crowd will inevitably “bring about the Orwellian future they claim to oppose” because “their solutions always favor more government centralization and control.”
He also argues it’s crucial that the United States reign over China on AI superiority, or the rest of the world will embed China’s technology into their ecosystems. Sacks claims China’s models enforce ideological bias, censorship, and historical revisionism.
