Republican Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida sounded the alarm Wednesday on what she described as an advanced Chinese disinformation campaign targeting every member of Congress. Speaking at The Hill Nation Summit, Cammack argued that Beijing is waging a new form of warfare—one that doesn't rely on bullets but on data-driven manipulation of American minds.
“China and Russia and Iran would love nothing more than for us to say, absolutely, no data science,” Cammack, a member of the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, told NewsNation's Connell McShane. “That is because it is a cognitive warfare. They will never ever militarily be able to take us over. But they can do the things that they want to do and overtake the United States in a number of different ways.”
The Florida lawmaker asserted that foreign adversaries can shape policy in Washington without direct confrontation. Instead, they aim to infiltrate the minds of citizens across the nation, using sophisticated digital tools to drive narratives and shift public sentiment.
Digital Twins: A New Front in Information Warfare
“The thing that people need to recognize is that as we sit here, the Chinese government has already deployed digital twins of every member of Congress and has been using the data that they’ve harvested,” Cammack said. These digital twins are virtual models designed to predict a lawmaker’s voting behavior, mimic their speaking style on social media, and steer online discussions to influence public perception.
By mapping out a legislator’s political stance on key issues—and noting personal vulnerabilities and communication patterns—foreign actors can craft highly targeted disinformation campaigns. The goal is to generate enough constituent calls or social media noise to sway decision-making.
“The minute that your phone starts ringing in Washington and your constituents are saying, I don’t like this or I love this, if you get up to 250 of those calls, people start noticing,” Cammack explained. “And if they can drive a narrative on social media to get your constituents working, that’s an answer.”
Beyond National Security: Economic and Innovation Stakes
Cammack framed the AI race as far more than a national security concern. “It is an economic issue. It is an innovation issue. This is a competitive issue. It is a litany of issues,” she told attendees. Her comments come amid broader bipartisan scrutiny of China’s efforts to circumvent U.S. export controls on advanced AI chips. A recent report highlighted how Chinese firms have rented cloud servers in neutral countries like Indonesia and Japan to access powerful chips that are banned from direct sale to Beijing.
Rep. John Moolenaar, the Michigan Republican who chairs the Select Committee on China, has warned American companies to be cautious about cloud integration that could give Chinese firms backdoor access. “In the AI race, China will buy what it can and steal the rest, which is why it is actively trying to get backdoor access to U.S. data centers and train its AI models via cloud computing,” Moolenaar said last month. “U.S. cloud platforms have a role to play in stopping China’s AI buildup, which fuels its military and surveillance ambitions.”
The convergence of these threats—from digital twin disinformation to cloud-based chip access—underscores the urgency lawmakers see in maintaining U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence. For Cammack and her colleagues, the stakes are nothing less than the integrity of American democracy and its competitive edge in the global tech race.
