If our smartphones have turned us into dopamine junkies, then all of us “users” have a favorite drug of choice. For some, it’s doomscrolling through X; for others, it’s the smug competitiveness of Strava; for many, it’s the entertaining escapism of TikTok. For me, it’s the aesthetic allure of Instagram.

I have attempted to kick the habit many times. I have tried removing the app from my phone’s homepage, hoping that the icon being out of sight would mean out of mind. I have tried turning off notifications, unfollowing interesting accounts to make my newsfeed less entertaining, and imposing Apple’s new Screen Time feature — which is futile, anyway, since the option to ignore it is a button away. I have even tried turning my phone on black and white mode, hoping that if I remove Instagram’s vibrant technicolor I might be less inclined to scratch the dopamine itch.

None of it has worked. The persuasive design of these apps is simply too powerful for most of us to use them in moderation. They are masterclasses in psychological manipulation, and this is why the Government’s attempt to impose time limits on teenagers will fail. Technology Secretary Peter Kyle this week suggested an “app cap” of two hours a day as part of a crackdown on “compulsive” phone use.

There are three main problems with this proposal. The first is that the two-hour limit appears to be per platform, not in total; this means that once teenagers have exhausted their two hours on Snapchat, they can then just move on to spending two hours on YouTube, and so forth. The second is that tech-savvy teenagers will likely circumvent any restrictions with ease — for example, using different accounts for different devices or just flocking to other purpose-built platforms which don’t have the same boundaries.

A third problem is that time limits often actually make the problem worse. Studies show that, by outsourcing their self-regulation to the app, users actually spend more time online, and perceive any amount below the maximum limit as acceptable. In other words, the limit becomes a goal rather than a warning.

The effect is likely to be exacerbated in teenagers, who will find social media even more enticing because, as with other drugs such as alcohol and cigarettes, it is both available and unavailable. Teenagers are also keenly aware of any sense of injustice or deprivation; as a teacher, I have heard many horror stories from parents about toddler-style tantrums and meltdowns after phones or Xboxes were taken away. Many teens will no doubt find the “tease” of restricted social media use infuriating.

A blanket ban on social media for under-16s is the only way forward. If we are going to persuade both teenagers and parents — although opinions are slowly changing, many are still far too casual about screen time — then a clear, consistent message is needed. A halfway house helps no one except for Big Tech, which can continue to make products as addictive as possible because the addicts, apparently, can “use” for only two hours a day.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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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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