Gavin Newsom just received some bad news that he’s ecstatic to share. The California Governor announced in a Monday video that “federal agents” are poking around his network of friends and colleagues “not because they found a crime, but because they’re simply trying to find one”.

Newsom delivered his theatrical, straight-to-camera message both to Donald Trump (“put my name on every and any enemies list that you have”) and his own wife  (“I love you and I’m sorry he’s doing this”) in announcing the situation. What’s unclear is whether these investigations — seemingly into potential conflicts of interest regarding “First Partner” Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s nonprofit work — are legitimate or tied to a specific Trump directive.

It’s easy to imagine either way. Quite often, the President’s high-profile enemies are not squeaky-clean, giving Trump cover to launch probes with clear partisan purposes. In the case of Siebel Newsom, an anonymous source told the New York Times the investigations were not political and “had been initiated by federal law enforcement officials in California, not launched by officials in Washington”. The Times also noted that while “critics have raised the possibility of self-dealing” involving Siebel Newsom, there is “no public evidence of wrongdoing”. Questions have nevertheless been raised because her nonprofit accepts donations from companies and organizations with business before the state. Separately, Gov. Newsom’s former chief of staff pleaded guilty to three corruption-related felonies last month.

In a different era, a governor and presidential hopeful would normally try to downplay news of any federal investigation. Drawing attention to it would be considered political malpractice. Now, though, Newsom knows it elevates him. Speaking of Trump’s “hit list”, Newsom gravely intoned on Monday: “Today I proudly join that list.” Trump, said Newsom, “hates that I’ve consistently called him out for his lies and deceit”.

Through this speech, the California Governor not-so-subtly turned the announcement into an opportunity for self-promotion. It’s a political lesson he took from one person and one person only: Trump himself.

Sensing the populist tide of institutional distrust before most of Washington, Trump defeated a crowded field of Republican rivals and then Hillary Clinton in 2016 by presenting himself as the enemy of Washington rather than a creature of it. After his standing collapsed in the aftermath of January 6, Trump regained his political footing with remarkable speed. Once Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg indicted him, he surged past Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 Republican primary and never looked back. DeSantis himself attributed the stagnation of his campaign to this dynamic.

“In the end, they’re not coming after me,” Trump famously said amid the multi-front legal campaign he faced between White House stints. “They’re coming after you — and I’m just standing in their way.”

Trump is hardly shy about using the machinery of government against his political opponents. In January, he announced that “a fraud investigation of California” was underway. This is precisely the political opportunity Newsom is chasing. By positioning himself as a target of the administration, he can claim that he is being investigated because he is standing up to Trump — and doing so effectively enough to provoke retaliation.

Newsom may not be wrong in that calculation. Even if concerns about his wife’s nonprofit are legitimate, the political benefits of embracing an investigation led by Trump will likely outweigh the costs. It elevates Newsom above rival Democratic hopefuls, guarantees him national attention, and allows him to cast himself as one of the administration’s foremost adversaries.

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Emily Jashinsky is UnHerd‘s Washington correspondent.

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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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