As the country approaches a heatwave of up to 40 degrees Celsius this week, Britons are refrigerating wet towels and avoiding the Underground. France, meanwhile, has already been suffering from these temperatures over the weekend and has reacted by issuing stricter decrees.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu banned alcohol consumption in public spaces in any departments under a red heat alert — over half of the country — and the sale of alcohol at state-organised events, including the Fête de la Musique in Paris over the weekend. The city also banned “unpermitted gatherings, processions and parades” along the River Seine. The French government has certainly become more accustomed to policing its citizens’ vices, as just last year it banned smoking in almost all outdoor spaces.

In the heat, Parisians have been flocking to — and diving into — the algae-green Seine or the Canal Saint Martin to cool down. Some are being ordinarily silly, doing group backflips; others are being plain selfish by riding hired bikes straight into the river. The authorities have reasons to be concerned, as last year’s music festivals on 21 June drew two million people to the streets of the capital. Accordingly, this weekend, 5,000 police and 2,500 emergency and health service workers were deployed to Paris. The decrees were also partly justified in response to four teenagers sadly drowning in France on Saturday.

I have no problem with the state trying to prevent the tragedy of young lives being cut short, but I do have a problem with attempts to stifle ordinary human existence. We have a natural right to enjoy mother nature, more precious now amid rolling heatwaves. And isn’t people flocking to the river exactly what the government wanted? The famous plages — quayside mock sandy beaches — were started in 2002 by Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoë as a haven for Parisians unable to escape the city’s sweltering heat. More recently, President Emmanuel Macron personally pledged to swim in the Seine to show it was safe for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

We also have a civilisational right to drink alcohol, as, historically, drinking alcohol was one of the few safe things to drink. We built cities on beer. Aside from the obvious hypocrisy in banning drinking from cans on the street for a popular festival but allowing drinking from glasses in streetside cafés, similar bans rarely work, even in France. When the country banned absinthe in the First World War, recipes were adjusted, and it was instead called pastis. This ban may have lasted 96 years on paper, but it lasted no time at all in practice.

As recently as Covid, when the first lockdowns were relaxed, crowds relishing their newfound freedoms flocked to the Seine, which was then banned. After the second lockdown, the ban remained but was often ignored, with the public holding “clandestine parties”.

Look, wouldn’t it be convenient for public services if everyone did boring things like sipping on a chilled white vermouth and eating a salade niçoise while having un pique-nique in the shade? But not everyone shares such tastes, and it would be authoritarian to try to enforce a particular manner of relaxation. Instead, what we have is the same as during Covid: using a public emergency to restrict life, because it would be too stressful on the organs of state. Maybe the climate-change-is-just-authoritarianism naysayers who raised warnings decades ago were right all along.

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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