Earlier this week, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch wrote to BBC Director-General Tim Davie demanding “wholesale reform” of the corporation’s Arabic service, saying it provided a “platform for terrorists” and promulgated “appalling antisemitism” and “anti-Israel bias”. Such claims have been made before, notably by Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television. But Badenoch’s letter came after BBC chairman Samir Shah told MPs that employing the son of a Hamas official to narrate the Gaza documentary How to Survive a Warzone had been “a dagger to the heart” of the corporation’s vaunted impartiality. It may thus be hard to dismiss.

The Arabic service, which includes a TV channel and a website, is funded by both the Foreign Office and the license fee, and is supposedly bound by the same editorial standards as the rest of the BBC. Mindful of this, when Davie gave evidence to the Commons media and culture select committee in September, he said “every accusation we’ve had on the Arabic service we have looked at”, and that “broadly, I think we are doing a very good job.”

However, new figures supplied by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (Camera), which monitors BBC Arabic closely, call Davie’s assurance into question. In the first year of the war that started on 7 October 2023, BBC Arabic was forced to issue 141 separate corrections following Camera complaints. Some related to reports that described the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as “the resistance”; others characterized those killed while fighting for them as “martyrs” and inhabitants of Israel (as opposed to the Occupied Palestinian Territories) as “settlers”. The channel has also featured interviewees who praised those who “killed the Jews”, while some BBC Arabic contributors celebrated the Hamas massacre on social media.

In all, the BBC upheld more than 80% of the complaints Camera made about its Arabic output. Yet some of those it dismissed are worrying, especially those which Camera appealed to the Executive Complaints Unit (ECU), the corporation’s highest internal court.

Consider the ruling this week concerning a BBC Arabic report of the Amsterdam riot last November, when Israeli football fans were violently attacked by mobs yelling antisemitic abuse and saying they were on a “Jew hunt”. Five Israelis were hospitalized, and four of those responsible were later jailed. According to BBC Arabic, the attackers were merely “chanting slogans against Israel”. Yet after Camera appealed the BBC’s initial dismissal of its complaint, the ECU rejected it, saying that although BBC Arabic had indeed mentioned only “shouting”, this did not mean “violence did not occur”. Moreover, “the violence in Amsterdam was considered in much more detail elsewhere on the BBC” — which, given that the complaint was about BBC Arabic, could be said to be missing the point.

Other ECU decisions also look questionable. One concerned a BBC Arabic report in November 2023 saying 31 “journalists and media workers” had been killed in the Gaza conflict. It failed to state that 11 of them worked directly for Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) propaganda units, and another nine for outlets that hailed the October 7 attacks as “heroic” and “legitimate”. Yet although other BBC services had made all this clear, the ECU decided BBC Arabic’s omission was not misleading.

A third example concerns a report on an Israeli drone strike in the West Bank last August that killed five “Palestinian citizens”, without stating the fact that four of them were armed Hamas and PIJ terrorists. BBC Arabic’s source was a local reporter who also supplied the story to Reuters and Palestinian TV, which did report this. But according to the ECU, this was not “bias by omission”, because the story did say Israel had claimed it had bombed a militant operations center.

Meanwhile, it appears that an old ECU decision helps to explain one of the most controversial aspects of How to Survive a Warzone: the repeated translation of the Arabic word yahud as “Israeli”, not Jew — its usual, dictionary meaning. In 2013, it ruled on a complaint made by Camera over the use of the same mistranslation in an item on Radio 4, determining that this did not breach the BBC’s duty to provide “due accuracy”.

This set a precedent, for in 2019 the TV documentary One Day in Gaza included a segment in which a young man said in Arabic that when he listened to “revolutionary songs”, they “excite you, they encourage you to rip a Jew’s head off”. Here too, yahud was translated as “Israeli”, a decision condemned by the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt as “not translation” but “#antisemitism denial”. Labour politician Wes Streeting also pitched in, saying the BBC’s action was “totally unacceptable”.  As so often, the BBC stuck to its guns, claiming its usage was “true to the speaker’s intentions”.

Camera is left unimpressed. “With every single complaint that reached the ECU having been rejected, this putatively independent body appears to function as a rubber stamp for the whim of BBC Arabic editors,” its spokesman told me. This, he went on, was part of a trend whereby “a small group of BBC officials have marked their own homework.”

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

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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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