“Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK,” Keir Starmer claimed today, announcing a new Government scheme. “It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure. And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly, rather than hunting around for an old utility bill.”

Since the premiership of Tony Blair, Labour has been keen to introduce a comprehensive national database which would bring together control and administration, allowing the state to track citizens’ identities. This isn’t entirely driven by authoritarian urges, though politicians’ enthusiasm for telling us what to say online, as well as what to eat, drink and smoke, betrays a certain “we know what’s best for you” disposition.

In an age when private companies can profile each of us every time we look at their website, it’s frustrating for bureaucrats to work with ancient, creaking data systems that don’t join up. How much easier it would be for those running the benefits, tax, education, and healthcare systems if we could be identified as the same person across all of them. Civil servants look with envy at the private sector, where people can be tracked from platform to platform, and even through the real world, thanks to their willing use of smartphones for almost everything.

For this reason, though recent Conservative governments mostly denied wanting a national ID card scheme, in practice they were creating a de facto digital ID system by joining up existing administrative data on citizens. Our National Insurance number was gradually being attached to our identity across different Government departments. Some of those, such as passports and driving licences, already have biometric data to link faces to numbers. In a few more years, though we might not have an ID card, we would have existed as a digitally identifiable individual in a state database.

In that sense, Starmer’s Labour is merely being upfront about rendering us all transparent to the state via technology. Where the last Conservative government planned to outsource biometric ID schemes — for example, to prove one’s age — to private companies, Labour will simply add that to its own scheme.

Initially, these ID cards will be compulsory only for adults starting a new job. It’s a politically astute move to link the new cards to making it harder for illegal immigrants to find work, presenting a conundrum to many on the political Right who would instinctively oppose a “papers, please” society. Isn’t it true that the ease of working in the grey economy is a big pull factor for small boats and other irregular arrivals? How else can a government identify those who shouldn’t be in the country, or shouldn’t be working? Inevitably, that also means identifying those who have every right to be living and working in Britain.

However, as campaign groups have been swift to point out, there are dangers. For a start, such a comprehensive database is an irresistible target for hackers. In the week that a chain of nurseries woke to the nightmare of hackers not only posting the details of children on the Dark Web, but directly contacting their parents, the potential consequences of hacking a national ID database should be salient.

Just as importantly, such a system can be used not only to track and observe individuals but also to intervene in their lives. The Post Office scandal revealed how fallible technology can devastate the lives of innocent people, even when introduced with good intentions — by Blair’s government, incidentally.

A government whose intentions are at odds with its citizens’ interests could not only deny benefits, housing or healthcare to the ”wrong” people, but also use their digital identity to otherwise make their lives difficult. Debanking, travel restrictions, and other exclusions from public life have already been used by other governments to deter citizens from stepping out of line. However much you trust Starmer’s ministry not to misuse the powers that accompany a universal digital ID system, it’s extremely difficult to take back such powers from other, future governments.

But given that comparable systems were already sliding in by stealth, perhaps Starmer has done us a favour. By overtly proposing digital ID cards, he has painted a target, a focus for popular pushback as well as campaign groups which have long opposed such schemes. Already, a petition against them has surpassed a million signatures. Could this be, as some rival politicians are already suggesting, Starmer’s Poll Tax moment?

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Timandra Harkness presents the BBC Radio 4 series, FutureProofing and How To Disagree. Her book, Technology is Not the Problem, is published by Harper Collins.

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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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