The US Supreme Court has today handed down a crucial verdict, limiting the power of lower-court judges to issue “universal injunctions” to block the enforcement of policies nationwide.

There were two issues at stake in Trump v. CASA, and the Supreme Court decided one of them. While it avoided resolution of the main, hot-button topic — whether the Fourteenth Amendment confers birthright citizenship on the American-born children of illegal immigrants — it did decide the procedural issue that brought the case to the high court in the first place. District courts cannot issue injunctions which apply to the entire country, rather than merely to the parties before them.

In holding that they cannot do so, Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the other five justices in the majority reversed a troubling and anti-democratic trend that has been hamstringing all executive actions with increasing frequency since the turn of the century. Every executive action or law now faces some challenge in federal district courts as to its constitutionality. Fair enough: that’s a court’s job. But the remedy these judges impose — putting a government policy on hold for the nation as a whole, not just for the parties concerned — is a new and radical departure from how courts are supposed to work.

It used to be rare — until the Sixties it never happened at all — but it is now relatively common. It happened a dozen times to Barack Obama’s executive actions, 14 times to Joe Biden’s, and 64 times to Donald Trump’s in his first term alone, with 25 more in his second term after just six months.

Both parties’ lawyers and activists have abused this new loophole, though one side more frequently than the other, using it to delay the implementation of any policy they oppose. This then extends the process for years, until it reaches the Supreme Court. It is one of the leading causes of America’s national sclerosis, a painfully slow and extra-constitutional impediment to the elected branches’ ability to effect change. And that slowness contributes to voters’ loss of faith in government: the people vote for change, but the lawsuits drag out its implementation for so long that nothing happens. This process strikes hard at the idea of government by the people.

Today, that impediment has been removed. “These injunctions,” Barrett wrote, “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Congress never granted the lower courts a power to issue sweeping rulings, only to resolve cases in law and equity concerning the parties before them. “The universal injunction was conspicuously nonexistent for most of our Nation’s history. Its absence from 18th- and 19th-century equity practice settles the question of judicial authority,” Barrett added.

Following today’s ruling, Trump referred to district judges as “a grave threat to democracy”. The outcome is a victory for him, but it would have been a victory for Biden had the opinion been issued four years ago. It is also a win for Congress, in a way, since legislation it passes is often subject to the same constitutional challenges. It is a win for the elected branches and a limitation on the unelected judiciary. In short, it is a good day for American democracy.

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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