As the Democratic National Convention began in Chicago this week, one local group used the occasion to show off its national influence. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has just concluded a two-day event, hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, which featured high-profile speakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“It is the home of the progressive movement in the city,” CTU president Stacy Davis Gates said in her welcoming remarks, describing the auditorium where the event was being held as “the house of justice, the house of equity, the house of power”. The CTU is a branch of the American Federation of Teachers which, along with the National Education Association, represents millions of educators across the country.

Those unions are powerful in shaping the Democratic agenda on a variety of issues. First Lady Jill Biden is an NEA member. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, is a former teacher whose selection by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has been celebrated by the unions.

The CTU, which represents 20,000 educators in the nation’s third-largest school district, clearly wants to shape the national conversation. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, only 17 cents of every dollar is spent by the CTU to advocate for its members. And as the Economist recently put it, the CTU has become “one of the most powerful in the country”, despite its relatively small membership of 20,000 (the United Auto Workers boasts 400,000). It has done so by shaping, and adopting, the rhetoric of intersectionality and “liberation” now common in progressive circles.

Gates said she was “radicalised” by the CTU’s 2012 strike, the first in a quarter of a century. The strike in Chicago led to similar actions across the country and made the CTU one of the most visible progressive organisations during Barack Obama’s second term. But once Donald Trump came along, the CTU experienced the same mission creep as the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and other progressive institutions. If social pathologies were intersectional, the thinking went, the solutions had to be as well. But no organisation can do everything well.

The CTU achieved a major victory in electing current Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023 with a massive organising operation. Unfortunately, though, the progressive politician is desperately unpopular — if his approval rating hits 30%, it will be major news — and the CTU is (not unfairly) blamed for guiding his administration.

During Covid, the CTU truly came out of its shell. In late 2020, as schools that had been closed the previous spring tried to reopen for in-person instruction, it said in a tweet: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” As a result, schools stayed closed there longer than in most other places, with another reopening fight erupting at the end of 2021.

That same year, the CTU also called for the Government to “defund police and banks; support schools and a more just social order,” per a 2020 blog post. And more recently, after the 7 October attack in Israel, it was one of several labour groups to call for a ceasefire. Moderates can ignore this sort of rhetoric, but only for so long. The streets of Chicago are currently filled with thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters demanding an end to the conflict.

The devastating argument against the CTU comes from its own work. According to results from the Illinois Assessment of Readiness, 31% Chicago students in the third through eighth grade are proficient in reading. Only 19% are proficient in maths. What kind of liberation, what kind of solidarity, is that? Democrats should take note: the sooner it can move on from the CTU, the better.

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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