A new report from the Bitcoin Policy Institute alleges that Neville Roy Singham, a tech mogul who sold his consulting company for $785 million and moved to Shanghai, has been bankrolling a web of American nonprofits that produce content opposing U.S. data centers, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and semiconductor export controls, all to China's strategic advantage. Two senior members of Congress are now demanding federal investigations.
Sen. Tom Cotton, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, sent a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in mid-June requesting a Department of Justice probe into what he called "foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure." Rep. Brett Guthrie, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, separately asked the FBI and the chairmen of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology to provide information on the same influence campaign.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Bitcoin Policy Institute report, authored by Sam Lyman, a former senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, traces five years of activity by Singham-funded organizations. Those groups, the report alleges, have been churning out papers opposing export controls on advanced semiconductors to China, newsletters quoting Chinese Communist Party officials who attack America's technology posture, and articles casting U.S. data centers as fronts in "the new Cold War on China."
The real-world results are already visible. Prince George's County, Maryland, temporarily halted data center development after a campaign championed by the D.C. chapter of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Charlotte, North Carolina, approved a five-month moratorium on data center construction on June 8, following a PSL door-knocking campaign.
Singham made his fortune with Thoughtworks, a technology consulting firm he sold in 2017. He relocated to Shanghai, where he now lives with his wife, Jodie Evans, the leader of Code Pink. What he has done with that fortune since is the subject of growing congressional and law enforcement scrutiny.
The nonprofits linked to Singham span the country. Tricontinental, a Massachusetts-based think tank where Singham chairs the international advisory board, serves as what the Bitcoin Policy Institute report describes as the hub of the network's opposition to U.S. AI and semiconductor export control efforts. The People's Forum, a New York City event space co-founded by Claudia de la Cruz, who also ran as the PSL's presidential candidate, houses the studios of BreakThroughNews, another Singham-funded outlet. Brian Becker, co-founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, hosts a podcast there. His son, Ben Becker, serves as BreakThroughNews editor in chief and edits the PSL publication Liberation.
Singham's own son, Nate Singham, once served as a researcher at Tricontinental.
The financial scale of the operation is significant. Fox News reported that Singham has funneled $278 million into his nonprofit network since 2017, with $22.5 million directed to The People's Forum alone. Officials from the Justice, State, and Treasury departments are investigating financial activity tied to the network. None of the organizations involved have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, told Fox News that Singham's network tries to "spread and influence other organizations and participate with other organizations in protests, in demonstrations that are going to create chaos in the streets of U.S. cities." Rep. Carlos Gimenez, a Florida Republican, raised a sharper question about the money itself: "The real crux of the matter is the genesis of that money, is he really that rich? Or is it a false rich that, yeah, he's got a billion dollars, but the billion dollars came from Communist China."
The timeline of Tricontinental's publications maps closely onto the escalating U.S.-China technology competition. In November 2021, after President Trump banned companies using American technology from producing semiconductors for Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE, but before the Biden administration's stricter October 2022 export controls, Tricontinental published a paper titled "Big Tech and the Current Challenges Facing the Class Struggle."
That paper stated that "China's state capacity has allowed it to be the first country to implement a commercial 5G network on a large scale." It also identified China's dependence on American processing chips as "the main choke-point for the US to delay or even block China's progress." The framing treated American export controls not as a national security measure but as an obstacle to Chinese advancement.
Tricontinental's executive director, Vijay Prashad, acknowledged the financial relationship openly. In a 2021 social media post, Prashad described Singham's money as the "original source" for Tricontinental's endowment, calling Singham "a Marxist with a massive software company!"
By April 2023, Tricontinental's newsletter opened by quoting Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Mao Ning, who charged that the United States was "abusing export control measures to wantonly block and hobble Chinese enterprises." The newsletter presented the CCP official's complaint without challenge.
Then in March 2026, Tricontinental published an article pushing back against the very concept of U.S.-China great power competition. It reframed the conflict as one between "two fundamentally different logics of technological development", the American model "rooted in monopoly and rent extraction" and the Chinese model rooted in "production, scale, and diffusion." The framing cast Beijing's state-directed technology strategy as benign diffusion and American innovation as predatory extraction.
Code Pink, the protest group Evans leads, once vocally criticized China's human rights record. That posture has changed. The organization now, as the Bitcoin Policy Institute report details, focuses its energy on opposing American AI infrastructure.
In a Substack post published in January, Code Pink warned that "toxic chemicals are seeping into the lungs" of people who live near data centers, "causing asthma and long-term illness." The group also attributed hearing loss, anxiety, cardiovascular stress, toxic waste, and what it called "electronic pollution" to data center operations.
These health claims have fueled local opposition. The PSL organized the ground-level campaigns that produced concrete policy results, the Prince George's County halt and the Charlotte moratorium. The Party for Socialism and Liberation describes itself as existing "to carry out the struggle for socialism in the United States" and does not disclose its funding sources. The Bitcoin Policy Institute report describes the PSL as "deeply enmeshed with the Singham network."
Singham's network is not operating in a vacuum. The broader pattern of Singham's collaboration with CCP-linked institutions extends well beyond domestic data center fights. Just The News reported that Singham admitted at a CCP-backed forum in Shanghai that he had written a 174-page report to combat the U.S.-backed "international rules-based order", which he called a "lie", and to help Xi Jinping achieve a "new world order" more favorable to China. He writes under the Chinese name "Luo Yi" for the pro-CCP outlet Guancha and collaborates with Chinese government-run universities including East China Normal University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Fudan University.
The New York Times, in a sprawling 2023 investigation, identified Singham as the source of a "global web of Chinese propaganda." The Times described how China's cultivation of its own propaganda outlets and foreigners like Singham produces something that looks like "an organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points, echo one another, and are echoed in turn by the Chinese state media."
That echo chamber is not hypothetical. The Washington Free Beacon reported in April that Chinese propaganda outlets, China Daily, China's Global Times, and China Global Television Network, have been producing content in the United States aimed at stoking opposition to AI development and data centers. Semafor reported in May that China was "becoming a scapegoat for US data center backlash," a framing that treats the documented connections as mere accusation.
The New York Post reported that the U.S. State Department transmitted a report to Congress formally linking Code Pink and The People's Forum to Chinese influence operations. That report stated that China "spreads propaganda through influence campaigns run by nonprofit organizations like Code Pink, the People's Forum and groups linked with the notorious Singham network."
The expansion of Singham-linked activist hubs across the country makes the network's domestic footprint harder to dismiss as marginal.
Cotton did not hold back. In a statement accompanying his letter to the acting attorney general, the senator said:
"Neville Singham has ties to the Chinese Communist Party so it's no surprise he's pushing anti-American policies through fake nonprofits. The Department of Justice should launch a full investigation into this attempt to undermine America's prosperity."
Lyman, the report's author, went further, calling on Congress to use its compulsory powers. "It's time that Congress consider using its subpoena power to get answers from these nonprofit executives," Lyman said, adding that it was "time to subpoena Neville Singham himself."
Neither the DOJ nor the FBI has publicly responded to the congressional requests. Singham himself has not responded to the allegations in the Bitcoin Policy Institute report. Whether federal investigators will treat this as a FARA enforcement matter, a counterintelligence concern, or something else remains an open question.
The growing public identification of Singham as the bankroller behind this far-left nonprofit network has made the arrangement harder to sustain in the shadows.
What is not in dispute is the pattern: an American citizen living in Shanghai funds a constellation of nonprofits that produce content indistinguishable from CCP talking points, organize local campaigns that slow American infrastructure, and refuse to disclose where their money comes from. If that is not the kind of foreign influence operation that federal law was designed to address, it is hard to imagine what would be.
