More than half of Americans believe the First Amendment goes “too far” in guaranteeing free speech, according to new polling from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

In total, 53% of Americans, including 61% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans, believe the First Amendment goes too far. About 40% at least somewhat trust the Government to determine which speech is problematic, joined by about 25% who trust the Government “a little” on this front.

Under the First Amendment, the US has more robust free speech rights than other Western nations, with Americans free to make offensive and inflammatory comments that would be banned in much of Europe without Government penalty. Germany’s ban on Holocaust denial, and the UK’s criminal penalties for obscene and offensive social media posts, would both be unconstitutional in the US. These rights, however, are not universally celebrated by Americans.

Left-wing individuals and organisations have been cited as being more responsible for opposing free speech in the past decade, pushing for the deplatforming of conservative speakers on college campuses and leading pressure campaigns to have conservatives fired from their jobs. This includes the resignation of Mozilla Firefox co-founder Brendan Eich in 2014, who had previously donated to a California ballot initiative which opposed same-sex marriage, a moment often cited as the beginning of contemporary cancel culture. More recently, reporters have released the names and personal information of anonymous Right-wing social media influencers, and elected Democrats have suggested journalists who covered the Twitter Files story posed a danger to the country.

Elements of the Right, however, have also been softening on their commitment to free speech. Republican Sen. Josh Hawley explicitly cited anti-Israel content as a motivating factor for banning TikTok last year, a violation of the principle that Government restrictions can’t be content-based. Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbot similarly called for a crackdown on campus protesters in the state on the basis of alleged antisemitism, rather than a content-neutral application of anti-trespassing laws.

“Evidently, one out of every two Americans wishes they had fewer civil liberties,” Fire Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens said in a press release. “Many of them reject the right to assemble, to have a free press, and to petition the government. This is a dictator’s fantasy.”

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is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

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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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