Scotland has “collectively lost its mind on trans issues”, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed. The former first minister was speaking at an event in Aberdeen on Sunday night to promote her recently published memoir, Frankly, and defended her record in government. Among the policies discussed was her support for the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, which sought to reform the process by which people could legally change their gender.

“We weren’t the first in the world to propose this,” Sturgeon said of the bill. “Scotland wasn’t doing something that had never been done before.” She cited the example of the Republic of Ireland, which passed the Gender Recognition Act in 2015. During Sunday’s event, the former first minister acknowledged that she bears some responsibility for the debate over gender self-identification becoming “more polarizing”, though she insisted to host Catriona Stewart that she would “not apologize for standing up for trans people”.

Sturgeon resigned as Scottish first minister in February 2023, a month after the UK Government blocked the GRR Bill from receiving royal assent. Early that same year, she also referred to convicted rapist Isla Bryon, a biological male who was placed in a women’s prison, using female pronouns. In Frankly, Sturgeon admitted that she should have “hit the pause button” on her gender reforms in order to develop a consensus in Scotland on the issue. While promoting the book, she suggested that male rapists should “probably” forfeit the right to choose their gender.

On Sunday, the ex-SNP leader said that she doesn’t “want to force anybody to believe anything that they don’t want to believe”. She added that “I will always push back against the vilification of a minority that are already pretty stigmatized,” and claimed that “there’s too much punching down on trans people for my liking right now.” For Sturgeon, women’s rights and trans rights are not “in conflict”, and she argued that she “can be a champion and somebody who advocates and stands up for both”.

Earlier in the course of her book tour last month, Sturgeon conceded that she was “partly responsible” for the loss of “rationality in this debate”. While in office, she claimed that opponents of her reforms used women’s rights as a “cloak of responsibility” for transphobia, adding that “just as they’re transphobic you’ll also find that they’re deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.” On Sunday evening, she said that “the normalization in this country of far-Right language and rhetoric and attitudes and opinions is terrifying.”

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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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