Yesterday the EU announced plans to “create a CIA-style European spy service”, as Politico’s headline put it. On social media, many responded to the report with satirical and mocking comments. “But there already is a CIA-style spy agency operating across all of Europe. It’s called the CIA,” one user quipped on X. “I propose to call the new agency Gestapo,” jibed another. Such comments are indicative of the mood in Europe today, where any policy proposal coming out of Brussels tends to be met with a heavy dose of scepticism and mistrust.

This is understandable, given the increasingly unaccountable nature, ever-broadening scope, and growing list of policy failures of EU institutions — first and foremost the European Commission. So it’s not surprising that most people instinctively find the idea of giving “Empress” Ursula von der Leyen an army of supranational spooks to spy on citizens and carry out other nefarious “CIA-like” activities deeply disturbing.

Fortunately, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. Politico’s clickbaity headline refers to one of the many proposals contained in a new report authored by former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö on “Strengthening Europe’s Civilian and Military Preparedness and Readiness”. Highlighting recent crises — particularly the war in Ukraine — Niinistö advocates for a “comprehensive preparedness” approach, which would ensure the EU can “function under all circumstances” through an integrated response to cross-border crises. This approach, according to the report, must incorporate a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society” framework, enabling active participation from citizens, private sectors, and public authorities​.

The report then puts forward a mixed bag of vague proposals, such as cultivating a “preparedness culture” within EU institutions and among citizens, long-term investments in critical infrastructure and defence, formalising cross-sectoral crisis response and “enhancing EU intelligence-sharing capacities”. The latter is the one most news reports have picked up on.

One area of focus is enhancing intelligence-gathering and sharing at the EU level, primarily in terms of improvements to the bloc’s Single Intelligence Analysis Capacity (SIAC), which currently depends on voluntary contributions from member states. The report thus emphasises the need for more structured and reliable intelligence-sharing from member states. More controversially, in addition to SIAC’s role, the report also proposes the eventual development of an EU intelligence cooperation service, which would effectively amount to a supranational body that would be complementary to national intelligence-gathering activities.

This would be a very disturbing development: giving an accountable, undemocratic institution such as the EU its own intelligence agency would be yet another step in the bloc’s transformation into a techno-authoritarian juggernaut. Just like with the CIA, such powers would most likely be directed mainly at citizens and even member states rather than “foreign enemies”. What’s more, anyone who thinks this would be a step in the direction of greater “strategic autonomy” for the EU would be disappointed: the report also calls for “strengthening EU-Nato cooperation”, which means that any “EU intelligence agency” wouldn’t just be a CIA-like agency: it would, quite literally, be a subsidiary of the CIA.

In many respects, that is already the case: EU governments already share their intelligence with the US-led Five Eyes network tying together the agencies in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. The same is not true in reverse, as the US doesn’t share all its information with its fellow powers: in fact, it’s well-known that American intelligence agencies regularly spy on their European “allies”.

On a positive note, it should be emphasised that this new agency is unlikely to see the light of day any time soon. During the launch of the report, von der Leyen herself admitted that there is still a lot of resistance to such a proposal in European chancelleries, stressing that the focus for now would be just on “strengthening of information sharing”.

It’s also unclear how the EU would pay for this new agency, given that the budgets of member states are stretched and there is little appetite for issuing more common debt. Niinistö himself admitted that, in his talks to draft the document, he had encountered “many critical voices” on the possibility of new joint loans, because some countries refuse to engage in new mechanisms whereby they “take from us and give to others”.

Still, we should never forget that, in recent years, the European Commission has already broadened its scope into several policy domains that have traditionally been the remit of national governments, such as foreign policy and defence and security matters. In the meantime, the Overton window of supranationalisation has inched open just a little more.

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Thomas Fazi is an UnHerd columnist and translator. His latest book is The Covid Consensus, co-authored with Toby Green.

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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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