After a three-week hiatus, Elon Musk has returned to the political fray. Over the last three days, the world’s richest man has attacked Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” and pledged to bankroll primary challengers against any so-called deficit hawks who vote for it.

In doing so, Musk has thrown his support behind Thomas Massie, the Congressman for Kentucky’s 4th District. Massie is an outlier in Washington — a principled libertarian and fiscal hawk who rejects money from major institutional donors and lobbies. He’s even maintained a long-running feud with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), prompting the group to fund a $300,000 ad campaign against him. So far, such efforts have failed because Massie remains genuinely popular with his constituents.

As a resolute critic of the BBB, Massie has also been subjected to escalating attacks from the President, culminating in Trump openly stating that he will organize a serious primary challenge to finally rid himself of this troublesome Congressman. But these attacks on Massie have never been particularly popular inside the MAGA base; one only has to look at the responses to Trump’s posts on Massie to see that even some of his own supporters are not on board with these attacks.

The fact is that the issues Massie claims to care about — balancing the budget and reducing the deficit — were once core MAGA talking points, at least until the BBB revealed the movement’s shift in priorities. By continuing to champion fiscal restraint, Massie has therefore been branded a traitor by some. But to others, he’s simply being ideologically consistent — and honest. Not everyone, it turns out, is willing to pretend that “we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”

Just as there has been a massive about-face in recent budget deficit rhetoric, so too has the Right’s view on Elon Musk. A couple of months ago, the Tesla CEO was a political genius, a visionary, a captain of industry, and a great statesman in the making. Yet once Musk fell out with Trump, he immediately was recast as an irrelevant, bumbling grifter. But if Musk was once massively overhyped and oversold, the danger now is that he is prematurely dismissed or underestimated.

While the Tesla CEO may lack sharp political instincts, an alliance with someone like Thomas Massie makes strategic sense for both. Massie is popular with his base and, should the BBB unravel, he’d be well-positioned to seize the moment. Musk, by contrast, is not especially popular, but he has what Massie and others lack: deep pockets and a clear willingness to use them. That combination could prove potent, especially if others follow suit.

Though the BBB itself looks likely to squeak across the finish line, Musk’s return to politics might end up distorting the 2026 midterms, turning what should be a fight against the Democrats into various well-funded internecine struggles and primaries. Now, Musk has the motive, the opportunity, and the means to fund one side in this political proxy war. Massie might just be the beginning.

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Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

SwordMercury

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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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