Four-fifths of Americans believe that speech can be a form of violence, according to a new poll.

As part of its quarterly Free Speech Index, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) — in collaboration with YouGov — surveyed 1,000 Americans about their views on free speech. Only 20% completely disagreed with the statement “words can be violence”, and a combined 80% of respondents said the statement at least “slightly” represented their thoughts on the matter. That figure includes 22% who said the statement reflects their thoughts “completely”.

Respondents were pessimistic about the current state of free speech in the US. Slightly more than half at least slightly believed the First Amendment goes too far in protecting free speech, and 64% believe the country is headed in the wrong direction on the issue. Fewer than half said they were not worried at all about losing their jobs as a result of something they’d said, and only 24% believed the right to freedom of speech was very or completely secure.

The survey also found low levels of support for several types of constitutionally protected speech. Only 37% said Americans definitely or probably should have the right to use profanity when speaking with elected officials, and only 55% said Americans should have a right to mock candidates for public office in parody videos. The latter question was inspired by a California law, which was recently blocked in court, banning political “deepfakes”.

These results track with prior polls’ findings that, while Americans strongly support free speech in the abstract, they’re skeptical about the specifics, particularly when it comes to controversial speech. For example, Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz said in a vice-presidential debate at the start of this month that the First Amendment does not protect hate speech or disinformation — a statement US legal precedent does not support.

The idea that speech can constitute violence has flourished at universities in the past decade, and has been received positively in some corners of the media. Since 7 October last year, this has played out in the form of pushback against anti-Israel protesters in the name of combating antisemitism. For instance, in March, Texas Governor Greg Abbot ordered universities to “update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech”.

Meanwhile, the survey did find several areas where free-speech beliefs remained strong. An overwhelming majority, 87%, said one should be allowed to speak freely during a public comment session, and 73% said one should be allowed to criticize a public official during a council meeting. “Equating words with violence trivializes actual physical harm, shuts down conversations, and even encourages real violence by justifying the use of force against offensive speech,” FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said in a statement accompanying the new report. “Free speech isn’t violence, it’s the best alternative to violence ever invented.”

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is UnHerd’s US 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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