RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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An X investigation just found 200k Chinese bot accounts, including 200 posting anti-AI content
The posts were targeting and amplifying legitimate US citizen concerns about data centers
Is this part of a Chinese effort to slow down American innovation, to race ahead?
X's Global Government Affairs account has revealed it "identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts," 200 of which "posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy."
Some of the narratives that these 200 accounts were promoting included that: AI data centers are pushing up household electricity prices, rapid data centre construction is placing excessive strain on the US grid, and ordinary households are subsidising wealthy AI and data center companies.
Among the post types were visual, cartoon-like illustrations depicting data center operators getting rich, while consumers picked up the cost.
X Chinese bot accounts
X described the activity as an attempt to interfere with what it explicitly acknowledged as "legitimate debate" about American AI and energy – many of the underlying concerns about electricity demand and consumer bills are indeed supported by genuine data, but the platform worries these accounts could skew public discourse.
The company now says it's suspended the accounts that violate its authentication policy, stressing that while it wants X to remain an "open and authentic platform," fake accounts and bots are not welcome.
The post describes the offenders as "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," but no further detail was shared about the operators, the ties to China, engagement and reach figures, and what the other 199,000+ accounts were doing.
Is China targeting US AI?
In a similar vein, OpenAI also recently uncovered a similar operation, implying this X case isn't alone. The ChatGPT maker called that earlier operation a 'Data Center Bandwagon', when it banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts using ChatGPT to produce propaganda-like material and other similar social media content criticizing US AI data centers.
According to the company, the accounts responsible prompted in Simplified Chinese, often requested English outputs and used VPNs to avoid the restrictions placed on mainland China.
More broadly, Axios previously reported pro-AI organizations were worried that China-linked bot campaigns were promoting opposition to US data centers, possibly in a bid to slow America's ability to build out its AI infrastructure while buying China time to get ahead.
"Industry, governments, civil society and the public should remain alert for similar attempts to scale these messages and foreign interference activities," OpenAI warned in its June 2026 report.
Together, these two cases imply that China-linked operators are deliberately experimenting with ways to boost American opposition to AI infrastructure using existing concerns, but what sort of an impact these accounts are actually having on public perception is not yet so clear.
"We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy," X wrote.
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