Derrick Van Orden says data center opposition comes 'from the Chinese companies' who are 'paying people to say this stuff.' NPR went looking for the evidence. Researchers tracking foreign influence said: 'We haven't found much.'
The Sierra Club and CHIPS Communities United sued the EPA over approvals for two new semiconductor chemicals. The agency's own consent orders identify acute toxicity, genetic toxicity and reproductive harm, name acute lethality as the primary concern for the chemical class, and say there are insufficient data to assess the risk — and the chemicals' identities are a trade secret.
A Washington Post investigation found lawmakers outsourcing their work to chatbots with almost no oversight. Tuberville uses ChatGPT on policy. Anna Paulina Luna's office shipped an amendment summary with 'Claude responded:' still in it. Mike Flood asked a bot about housing.
Orangetown's planning board unanimously halted a data center expansion near the Lake Tappan reservoir. New York then paused permits statewide. Lawler's response was a Fox Business hit about innovation and China — and he had already voted for a bill that would have banned states from writing AI rules at all.
Breckinridge and Daviess counties passed moratoriums. Meade County killed a project after 3,000 people signed a petition. Guthrie's answer was a bill that only asks states to think about it — and a request that the FBI look into who's behind the opposition.
She signed an NDA with Meta's shell company in June 2024 that gave her inside details on a $50 billion data center. Within months she was buying Meta and Nvidia stock. She hid the trades for more than a year — and she was 100 late trades into a much bigger pattern.
Obernolte chairs the House subcommittee writing AI policy and wrote the bill that would bar states — including California — from imposing safety transparency, auditing or incident-reporting duties on AI developers. He also helped launch a nonprofit that charges AI startups up to $3,500 a month for access to policymakers.
Five weeks after telling a hearing that Ohioans' worries about data centers 'deserve to be taken seriously,' the chairman of the House Energy Subcommittee signed a letter asking the FBI whether foreign adversaries are behind the backlash.
Two super PACs with deliberately vague names — one funded by an Anthropic-backed nonprofit, one by Coinbase and Ripple — put more than $2.1 million behind a first-time candidate in San Antonio. Their ads never mentioned AI or crypto. His website did.