Ted Cruz claims China and "effective altruism" backers are waging a deliberate influence campaign to shape AI policy and data center debates.
Page A5From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 27 September 2026
Cruz demands top priority for beating China on AI; his party delivers wide-open access instead.
As it ran on the front
On September 22, a group of Senate Democrats stood up and said the plain thing out loud: President Trump is failing to block China from getting its hands on sensitive American technology it needs to accelerate its own artificial intelligence programs. Not "might fail." Is failing, present tense, right now, while the loopholes that let this happen sit unclosed. The Democrats' ask was not complicated. Close the gaps that China has already used to route around the export bans. That's it. That was the whole finding.
Four days later, on September 26, Senator Ted Cruz stood in front of a different microphone and told Fox News that winning the AI race against China is "the single most important economic question" facing the country. Not health care. Not the price of eggs. Not the deficit hawks who've been circling the same drain for going on fifty years. The AI race. The single most important question in America, according to the man whose own party controls the administration the Democrats just accused of leaving the door open.…
…(cont) Cruz did not stop at the stakes. He went further, describing China and something he called "effective altruism" backers as running a coordinated influence campaign to shape how America regulates data centers and AI policy. A shadowy campaign to steer the debate — delivered the same week his own colleagues on the other side of the aisle produced a paper trail showing the administration Cruz's party runs isn't steering anything, isn't blocking anything, is in fact the reason the campaign has anywhere to land.
You can hold both of these as true at once, because the wire says you have to. The single most important economic question in America, and the administration entrusted with answering it, are not, per the Senate's own Democrats, currently on speaking terms. Cruz wants you thinking about a race. The Democrats want you looking at the track, where the other runner already has a key to the gate.
Nobody in this story is confused about what's important. Cruz said it himself: single most important. The confusion, if you can call it that, is why the loophole he never mentioned is still open four days after his colleagues said it was.
“So it's the single most important economic question in America — but nobody in charge can find five minutes to shut the door it's supposedly walking through? That's not a priority, that's a press release. You don't get to call something existential and then leave the gate unlocked; that's the tell, that's always the tell. Every time.”
“Look, the Senator is simply drawing attention to the stakes — this is about American competitiveness, full stop, and the administration is absolutely committed to — okay, the Democrats did put out a whole finding on the loopholes. But that's a separate track from the — no, it's the same track. Huh. Anyway, single most important question, moving on.”
The receipts
A group of Senate Democrats on Tuesday said President Trump is failing to block China from accessing sensitive American technology to accelerate its development of artificial intelligence, ahead of the Chinese leader's state visit to Washington this week. Trump must close loopholes that China has used to subvert U.S. export bans on…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.