Support in Northern Ireland for a united Ireland has fallen to a 10-year low, according to new polling. The Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool found that 35.8% of respondents would support unification, down nearly five percentage points from 40.6% in 2025.

Over the past decade, support for a united Ireland had been steadily increasing. In 2017, the figure was 35%, rising to 38% by 2023 and 41.8% in 2024. However, the most recent statistics suggest the trend may be reversing.

Support for remaining in the UK has also steadily increased. The polling from the Institute of Irish Studies this year found that 61.4% of respondents would vote to remain in the UK, compared to 59.4% in 2025.

The findings come as Sinn Féin has continued to strengthen electorally in recent years. In early 2024, the party’s Michelle O’Neill became the first ever nationalist first minister of Northern Ireland. After entering office, she suggested that there would be a unification referendum within a decade. At the 2024 general election, Sinn Féin became the largest of Northern Ireland’s parties at Westminster.

In 2023, while Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer downplayed the idea of a referendum on a united Ireland. He suggested that a vote on unity was “not even on the horizon”, and that the idea was “absolutely hypothetical”.  Shortly after he was elected, Starmer stated that he was committed to the Good Friday Agreement. Former Labour leader and current independent MP Jeremy Corbyn has been a consistent supporter of a united Ireland, as has former shadow chancellor John McDonnell.

This latest data from the Institute of Irish Studies goes against the trends recorded by other pollsters. The Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey suggests that support for Irish unification has been increasing since 2015. Meanwhile, polling from the Arins Project backs this up, suggesting that support for Irish unity had been increasing in Northern Ireland but remained far lower than support for staying in the UK. Further polling suggests 66% of respondents from the Republic of Ireland would support a united Ireland.

Ireland became a largely self-governing state in 1922 as a result of the Anglo-Irish treaty, after a series of conflicts between Irish Republicans and the British state, including the Irish War of Independence. This established the Irish Free State in the south and Northern Ireland in the north as a separate region of the UK. The Irish Free State later became the Republic of Ireland after a formal declaration of independence in 1949.

The Good Friday Agreement provides for a referendum if it appears that a majority would support Irish unification. The Agreement was signed in 1998 between the UK and Irish governments and eight Northern Irish political parties, with the Democratic Unionist Party refusing to participate. This came after decades of fighting between the unionists and republicans, known as the Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement built on earlier ceasefires by paramilitary organizations and established power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties in Northern Ireland.

China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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