Private Intelligence Firms Are Selling Dossiers on AI and Data Center Critics

prospect.org Private Intelligence Firms Are Selling Dossiers on AI and Data Center Critics - The American Prospect Daniel Boguslaw 7 - 9 minutes

Private intelligence firms are selling dossiers about critics of artificial intelligence and the data centers powering them, including trying to peddle them to federal regulators, according to documents obtained by the Prospect. The offerings show that even as voter hostility toward data centers has emerged as an election-altering, bipartisan issue, corporate spy shops are hawking reports that frame widespread dissent in the language of counterterrorism to both private- and public-sector clients.

The drivers of negative sentiment toward data centers and AI include environmental concerns, fears of job loss, and increased utility prices near the sprawling compounds housing server farms and processing facilities. More broadly, people across the ideological spectrum don’t appreciate Big Tech interests dictating their local economic development. Hundreds of grassroots organizations have emerged across the country, seeking to curb data center construction and limit the negative effects of AI.

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But the threat products and reports obtained by the Prospect are less concerned with altering the root cause of this dissent, and more focused on the threat posed by an enraged American populace to corporations’ bottom line.

In a product offering from the corporate intelligence company RANE Network sent to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the corporate firm offered the federal agency—which regulates the interstate transmission and sale of electricity, gas, and oil—a tailored report on the threat posed by anti-tech sentiment.

“RANE can provide an assessment covering rising anti-technology sector sentiment among both the public and governments around the world, identifying specific implications for your organization,” the offering reads. Topics that RANE promises to cover include:

What has brought about an increase in anti-technology sector sentiment?
What role do misinformation and conspiracy theories play in shaping hostility toward the tech sector?
What risks does anti-technology sector sentiment pose to critical supply chains?
What are the potential implications of geopolitical tensions on the operations of technology companies?
How might increasing regulatory scrutiny impact the operations of major tech firms?
What actions can technology companies take to mitigate risks from anti-technology sentiment?

That email was sent in March 2025. This May, RANE offered a webinar on the coming anti-tech backlash. In the hour-long presentation reviewed by the Prospect, RANE cyber and intelligence analysts described the threat posed to technology companies by rising animosity toward Silicon Valley. RANE Network did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“There’s backlash on a lot of fronts and there are a lot of actors converging on this. So we’ve seen protests from creatives who are worried about AI taking over their copyrighted works,” one analyst told the audience. “There’s also environmental protests. Labor unions are protesting. We’ve seen protests from employees who may have been laid off or are worried about potential layoffs.”

The analysts also warned about protesters concerned about civil liberties and human rights violations arising from AI, and “protests about the impacts on mental health and just general anti-tech or neo-Luddite sentiment that is really driving this activity.”

In 2020, RANE acquired the geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor. Nine years prior, in 2011, Stratfor was breached by Anonymous, a hacker collective that published millions of internal emails on WikiLeaks. The internal communications detailed the company’s work monitoring the critics of major conglomerates, including Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola.

The specter of hacktivism continues to haunt RANE analysts. “Anti-establishment” and “anti-capitalist groups” alongside Anonymous were referenced during the presentation before a warning that “anti-tech and environmental protest … groups also have a history of some of them going beyond just protest movements to also include, you know, violent extremism,” an analyst said.

In addition to describing the general patterns of concerning groups, presenters also discussed surveilling “online chatter.” The analysts discussed how movements emerge from online spaces, and warned that things can spiral out of control quickly, which is all the more reason to surveil those spaces.

The push to surveil and monitor techno-skeptics comes at the same time that federal agencies have begun circulating their own surveillance memorandums of a new domestic extremist category: “anti-tech extremism.” As Wired reported in May, this new threat category is being used by the FBI and DHS to target constitutionally protected speech and assembly, regardless of whether or not participants have committed, or intend to commit, a crime. In leaked State Department documents obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, Secretary of State Marco Rubio informed employees that the agency was monitoring a new alliance of “militant anti-tech and eco-terrorist movements.”

Kroll, the world’s largest investigation and corporate intelligence firm, has also begun selling “risk intelligence” on “public controversy, labor tensions, executive visibility, activism, geopolitical pressure” and “reputational events” to data center operators, according to a June article posted on the firm’s website. Those interested in Kroll’s investigative and monitoring services are encouraged to reach out to its enterprise security risk management team.

Meanwhile, the online surveillance company Liferaft—a subsidiary of the world’s second-largest security firm, Securitas—published a report on July 31 summarizing months of online surveillance of alleged “Threats to AI Infrastructure and Executives.” In the report, Liferaft scanned and analyzed thousands of social media and online forum posts referencing “anger at AI executives,” “opposition to new data centers,” and “grievance over the resources these facilities consume.”

Liferaft’s monitoring tracks the ebb and flow of hostility toward AI companies and executives over the course of several months, but also explicitly warns of a shift in so-called organizational intent, “from personal frustration to coordinated rhetoric … [that] is something threat intelligence professionals pay close attention to, because it tracks with how movements organize.”

The same month Liferaft published its report, hundreds gathered in San Francisco’s downtown to protest AI companies and the existential risks they pose. Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI offices were all visited by protesters, including the AI theorist and spiritual leader of the AI-skeptic movement Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose book title “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” has become a rallying cry for critics of sentient AI. The constitutionally protected protest fits neatly in all three firms’ criteria as a surveillance target.