Nancy Pelosi has said that the upcoming election is unique in its threat to American democracy.

Speaking at Chatham House in central London, the Democratic former speaker said that Americans had a grave choice to make at the ballot box on 5 November. ‘What’s on the ballot is nothing less than democracy,’ said Pelosi. ‘Democracy in our own country, democracy writ large among our allies and alliances around the world.’

‘In our own country, the issue is about honoring our oath of office to the constitution, to protect and defend the constitution of the United States — that is very much at risk in this election,’ she added. Citing women’s rights and the Republican stance on abortion, the former House Speaker previously said that ‘freedom‘ was on the ballot. On another occasion, she said ‘everything we love‘ rests on the outcome of the election.

The 84-year-old went on to outline why Trump is different from other GOP leaders and why this election was particularly fraught. ‘Common ground; that is what we always have to strive for,’ she said. ‘That is our responsibility but we cannot shirk our responsibility as well — this has never been the case in an election before with John McCain, or Bob Dole, George Bush, George H.W. Bush, Mitt Romney. That hasn’t been the kind of election we’ve had, but it is with the current nominee of the Republican party.’

The former speaker’s comments come just a day after a man was arrested near Trump’s rally in California with loaded guns, thwarting what many are suggesting could have been a third assassination attempt on the Republican nominee in a little over three months. Republicans have accused the Democrats of using dangerous rhetoric which led to the political violence. After the second assassination attempt, Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance said: ‘You know the difference between conservatives and liberals? No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months’. He added: ‘The Left needs to tone down its rhetoric.’

Political violence was a topic that cropped up often in Pelosi’s conversation with Chatham House director Bronwen Maddox. She said that there was no place for violence in politics, referring to the almost-fatal assault on her husband at their home in San Francisco and the 6 January Capitol riots when her office was broken into. New footage from the day of the riots unearthed in August this year showed Pelosi calling Trump a ‘domestic enemy’.

Throughout the conversation, Pelosi attempted to not call Trump by his name, instead referring to him as the ‘other guy’ or the ‘former president’. Maddox joked that she ‘respect[ed] this principle of never uttering his name’. Having previously mentioned a Gandhi quote about bridging political divides, Pelosi responded: ‘I’m sorry Gandhi, I’m not there yet.’

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Max Mitchell is UnHerd’s Assistant 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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