OpenAI Draws Fire for Employee’s Remarks at Pro-Trump CPAC GB Event

A member of staff at the firm advocated for AI deregulation at the Reform-linked conference.

By Adam Barnett

Campaigners have criticised artificial intelligence giant OpenAI after one of its employees spoke at a pro-Trump political conference headlined by Nigel Farage. 

Adam Goucher, a member of technical staff at OpenAI, spoke at the CPAC Great Britain conference in London last week on a panel initially titled “How AI Can Deliver the British Counter-Revolution”, in which he was listed as a representative of OpenAI.

The panel was later renamed “The Right to Compute”, and his company affiliation was removed from the website. Goucher said he was “speaking in a personal capacity” but extensively cited his experience at OpenAI in his remarks.

Goucher criticised the “obstacles” to building highly polluting data centres in the UK – including OpenAI’s Stargate UK project, which the company paused in April – saying Britain should emulate the U.S. approach. He also appeared to agree with the suggestion that opposition to data centres was being funded by the Chinese government.

In response, Nick Dearden of the campaign group Global Justice Now warned that Goucher’s appearance at CPAC GB was another sign of a “deep connection between the tech monopolies that have a stranglehold on our economy, this radical-right international, and the UK’s data centre build out,” and urged new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to change course.

OpenAI did not respond to DeSmog’s requests for comment.

CPAC GB is a franchise of the Conservative Political Action Conference, a U.S. event supportive of President Donald Trump.

The UK branch is chaired by former Conservative prime minister Liz Truss, and its three-day event featured several speakers from Farage’s Reform UK, and the Conservative Party.

They spoke alongside Lucy Connolly, who was jailed for inciting racial hatred against asylum seekers during far-right riots in 2024, former TalkTV host Mike Graham, Alan Miller, a businessman who founded the Together Declaration, which has spread falsehoods about the Covid-19 vaccine, and Jack Posobiec, a right-wing U.S. influencer notorious for spreading the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.

At the event, speakers made a range of radical, incendiary remarks. Reform politician Matthew Goodwin labelled the Green Party the “Islamo Green Party” due to its popularity among Muslim voters, and claimed “there is a war going on in our country”. Anti-immigration and anti-Islam sentiments were frequent, with Reform councillor Annie May O’Neill claiming that “foreign men” are being “imported” into Britain, while U.S. anti-abortion influencer Seth Gruber claimed that Democratic New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is an “Islam jihadist”.

As DeSmog has reported, the event’s “official partner” was the Bitcoin Collective, a lobby group for the digital currency industry.

This isn’t the first time that OpenAI has attracted scrutiny for its ties to right-wing politics. The firm’s co-founder and president Greg Brockman gave $25 million to Trump’s 2024 election super PAC, while its CEO Sam Altman donated $1 million to the president’s inauguration fund – having both previously donated to Democrats.

Goucher’s panel was chaired by Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica executive and CEO of Alpha Compute, an AI infrastructure company, and also featured Matthias Gerber, a salesman for blockchain and AI company Bitmain.

The panel focused on the obstacles to building data centres, from regulation to the “disinformation” supposedly turning the public against AI projects.

Goucher said that “in Britain there are obstacles that are stopping us from building the data centres that we need… Stargate UK, the OpenAI initiative to build training clusters here in Britain, that was delayed because of energy costs and regulatory barriers,” he said. “Essentially, yes, it’s too expensive, too onerous to build anything here, and we need to be more like what happens in Texas, where we build and reap rewards.”

Although Big Tech companies have lobbied for the acceleration of AI infrastructure in the UK, Keir Starmer’s Labour government was strongly supportive of data centre development – designating the sites as “critical national infrastructure” and creating a series of “AI Growth Zones”.

These policies formed part of the UK’s ‘Tech Prosperity Deal’ signed with the Trump administration in September 2025. The U.S. paused the agreement in December following trade disputes, and it’s unclear whether the deal will be revived.

Dearden added that Starmer’s government “foolishly” negotiated the agreement with Trump last year and said that Burnham’s new administration should “reverse course on tech and data centre policy”.

“We need to break our dependence on both the Trump administration and fossil fuels,” Dearden said, “and that means a very different approach to technology. Many ordinary people agree which is why opposition to data centres and AI is growing rapidly.”

In particular, there are concerns about the climate and environmental costs of data centres. The UK government admitted earlier this year that it had underestimated the potential carbon emissions of data centres by a factor of more than 100, while these facilities demand vast amounts of water. Water UK, a trade body that represents water companies, has said that the country will not have enough water to power data centres and has called the government’s plans “fatally flawed”.

However, the panellists at the CPAC GB event claimed that opposition to data centre development is being manufactured by the Chinese government.

“This campaign against building AI data centres in the West, but specifically in the United States, is being funded out of China,” Kaiser claimed.

Goucher appeared to agree, saying that “if you look at the rationale behind the disinformation campaigns, it is precisely so that China can get a lead over us”.

He added: “Okay, so if you look at these boards either side of us, it says ‘Save Britain, Save the West’, and it’s of strategic importance that the West, including Britain, does continue to lead in AI.”

Kaiser based her claims about China on evidence from Kevin O’Leary, a celebrity investor famous for the programme Shark Tank, the U.S. equivalent of Dragon’s Den, and a pundit on Fox Business.

O’Leary, who is trying to build his own data centre near the Great Salt Lake in Utah, is currently being sued by campaigners opposed to the plans, whom he publicly accused of being funded by China.

Experts have said they are sceptical about the claim that widespread public opposition to AI and data centres is a Chinese influence operation. DeSmog has reported previously on baseless claims that opponents to fracking for shale gas have been funded by Russia.

Kaiser suggested data centres could be rebranded, saying: “I think one of the most interesting reports that I saw recently reframed AI data centres as intelligence factories.” Goucher agreed and suggested the term “training clusters”.

Kaiser also welcomed President Trump’s recent Truth Social post backing data centres and his working group on the issue, and linked this to electoral politics in the U.S. and the UK. She said: “reframing that conversation, especially ahead of the upcoming midterms in the United States and elections here, is so incredibly important.”

She also appeared to lay out the industry’s latest PR strategy to counter opposition to data centre construction, by presenting it as an issue of freedom.

Using the name of the panel, Kaiser said: “We launched the ‘Right to Compute’ campaign to say we should have the right to our energy independence, our compute independence, our data sovereignty in our own countries”.

She urged the audience to “talk to your neighbours, talk to your communities, talk to your legislators, to really make sure that they fully understand what this actually means, because it is quite existential.”

This was the second hardline conservative event in recent weeks to feature speakers from major AI companies.

In June, Chloe Lubinski, a senior figure at the U.S. tech firm Anthropic, spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London, a networking event for hard-right politicians, corporate leaders and political lobbyists. Lubinski suggested that ARC should help train Anthropic’s AI on ethical matters.

At the ARC event, U.S. Energy Secretary and former oil and gas executive Chris Wright urged the UK to lift its ban on new North Sea fossil fuels. He was speaking as the UK sweltered under record temperatures caused by climate change.

As revealed by DeSmog and Greenpeace’s investigative unit Unearthed, ARC has been funded by Trump donors and oil executives.

https://www.desmog.com/2026/07/21/open-ai-cpac-gb-data-centres/

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