US Vice President JD Vance has described social media as “a way to stay in touch” with what’s happening in America. During a wide-ranging interview with UnHerd, Vance addressed his extensive use of X (formerly Twitter), insisting that “I probably spend way less time on Twitter than I did six months ago, and that’s probably good for me.”

Vance has over four million followers on X, and he frequently uses the platform to engage in online debates and challenge his critics. In January, he got into a well-documented argument with British former politician and podcaster Rory Stewart, stating: “the problem with Rory and people like him is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130.  This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.”

When asked by UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari whether he tweets too much, the Vice President responded: “There are many blessings to this job. One unquestioned downside is that I very much live in a bubble.” Vance went on: “I’m surrounded by Secret Service agents. It’s very hard for a random person to walk up to me — in fact, it’s damned-near impossible.” In his view, social media is “a useful, albeit imperfect, way to stay in touch with what’s going on in the country at large”.

Vance’s insistence that he spends less time on X than he did before entering office may do little to shake the image imposed on him of a “Very Online” Vice President. His supporters have framed this as a digital savvy rare among frontline politicians, while his opponents have characterised his social media use as “hate-filled” and a “descent” into the “muck” of modern politics. MSNBC host Chris Hayes, writing before last November’s election, accused Vance of having “self-radicalized largely online”, and suggested that the then-Ohio senator and his allies were “constantly imbibing all kinds of genuinely monstrous, insane and bizarre ideas and have come to believe them”.

The Vice President has been willing to engage with less serious corners of the internet, too. Following a meme trend last month, in which edited versions of his face were imposed on pop-cultural figures ranging from Kim Kardashian to the Oompa-Loompas from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Vance responded with a meme of his own, in which the face of Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood morphed seamlessly into that of the Veep.

Where Donald Trump primarily uses Truth Social, X has become Vance’s platform of choice, a place to promote MAGA policies and make jokes at the expense of his critics. He may spend less time online since ascending to the vice presidency, but social media has provided Vance with a useful soapbox.

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Rob Lownie is UnHerd’s Deputy Editor, Newsroom.

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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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