A new WIRED investigation has uncovered a coordinated campaign where a dark money nonprofit is paying social media influencers thousands of dollars to spread fear about China's AI ambitions on TikTok and Instagram.
The nonprofit, called Build American AI, is a 501(c)(4) organization — meaning it doesn't have to disclose its donors. It's linked to the super PAC Leading the Future, which has received funding from some big names: OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and AI search engine Perplexity.
The campaign runs in two phases. First, lifestyle influencers — mommy bloggers, home creators — were paid to post vaguely positive content about American AI, with a generic "ad" tag. Now it's moving to phase two: explicitly anti-China narratives.
Here's how it works. SM4, the influencer marketing agency handling the operation, is offering creators $5,000 per TikTok video. The ask? Work a script into your otherwise normal content — making breakfast for the kids, that sort of thing — that warns about China stealing personal data and jobs. One sample line provided by Build American AI reads: "China is desperately trying to beat the US in AI. If they win, they'll get access to my and my kids' personal data, and they'll steal jobs that should belong to Americans."
The operation splits along political lines: SM4 recruits left-leaning creators, while a separate partner agency handles the right. Internal briefing documents show plans to expand from female lifestyle bloggers to left-wing political commentators, business and tech leaders, and male lifestyle creators. WIRED reporter Taylor Lorenz was personally invited by SM4, which is how she learned about the scheme — and multiple creators who received the same pitch confirmed it.
Leading the Future says it has raised $140 million in donations and commitments, with $51 million available as of April. Federal Election Commission filings show that Brockman and his wife each donated $12.5 million, as did Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. OpenAI told WIRED it has no connection to Leading the Future or Build American AI, and provided no funding or support. Palantir also said it didn't fund the effort. This setup is part of a broader US-China AI rivalry that has already seen Beijing block Meta's acquisition of the AI startup Manus, sending a warning to other tech companies eyeing Chinese AI assets.
And the backlash is already here: billionaire Chen Tianqiao, founder of Shanda Group, has walled off his AI lab MiroMind from China entirely — no shared code, data, or personnel between its China and US operations — a direct response to the Manus fallout.
"When influencers accept undisclosed money from an industry to promote specific company information, and the public has no idea, that's extremely corrosive to democracy," Queens College media studies associate professor Jamie Cohen told WIRED. "That's propaganda."