An emergency situation in Crete has once again pushed migration to the forefront of Europe’s political debate. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that around 12,000 migrants arrived there from North Africa this year, coming to an island with a population of a little over 600,000. This marks a 300% increase on last year’s figures, and Crete now hosts a third of all arrivals of irregular migrants in Greece. Its facilities are overcrowded and underfunded, while efforts to relocate these immigrants to other centers on the mainland cannot keep up with the pressures.

Inhospitable conditions like these may run counter to humanitarian obligations under European Union law, but EU member states have also politically used them to send a message of deterrence. Crete is only the latest example: previously, the island of Lampedusa in Italy, the Canary Islands in Spain, and Cyprus all served this purpose. The slow processing of asylum requests is part of the problem, and Cyprus even completely stopped processing Syrian nationals last year due to too many arrivals.

Another set of deterrence measures involves agreements with the countries from which those boats depart. Giorgia Meloni has been spearheading these efforts since coming to power in Italy in 2022. Meanwhile, the EU has signed agreements with Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania, Albania, and North Macedonia, which involve logistical and financial support for the countries to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. This is likely to provide a template for solving the emergency situation in Crete, too. Boats arriving on the island come from the Libyan city of Tobruk, which is not under the control of the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. Brussels and Greece are currently trying to work out a solution with the local administration under General Khalifa Haftar.

Irregular migrants are a favorite target of Right-wing movements throughout Europe. Last weekend, over 100,000 protesters gathered in central London, waving national flags and demonstrating against increased immigration into the UK. It was the largest rally ever organized by anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson. In France, the Right-wing politician Philippe de Villiers launched a petition this month calling for a referendum on immigration. It has already garnered 1.3 million signatures (though these figures may be inflated thanks to the capacity for one person to open multiple accounts), while former Rassemblement National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has seized on the petition as a sign of public exasperation at mass immigration into France.

Crete, being a much smaller island, is even more vulnerable to a sudden influx of migrants. As the EU wrestles with the developing crisis on the Greek island, a policy rethink should surely follow.

This is an edited version of an article first published in the Eurointelligence newsletter.

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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