Since the final destruction of the Islamic State’s “caliphate” more than six years ago, the group has struggled to rebuild. This is especially true of its former stronghold in Iraq, where Isis operations are notably down. While the group has perpetrated a number of successful attacks in Syria, notably against a church in June, the country’s new regime under Ahmed al-Sharaa has made efforts to crack down on terrorist activity. Meanwhile, the Americans remain on the scene and conduct occasional raids against the leadership, including one this week that killed a senior Isis member.

Yet Isis is a unified global organization, with nodes — or “provinces” (wilayat), as it calls them. Reports this week have highlighted a strengthened recruitment drive in Africa, with a facilitation network in South Africa and Zambia which raises funds and directs fighters around the continent. In the northern breakaway zones of Somalia, Isis’s crucial Al-Karrar Office collects and distributes funds to active theaters.

Local Somali efforts, with US assistance, have disrupted Al-Karrar to some degree, but it remains able to finance the group in Afghanistan — a concrete example of the global integration of Isis’s jihad. The most recent United Nations report compiling intelligence from member states describes Isis’s presence in Afghanistan as “the most serious threat, both regionally and internationally”. In a country run by the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, this is notable.

From the Sahel to Southern Africa, Isis has combined devastating acts of terrorism with an increasingly sophisticated insurgency that is overwhelming local states. This clears the way for the group to govern territory. But what does this mean for Europe?

A key problem here is that Russia has largely displaced America and France as the imperial guarantor in West Africa and the Sahel, where its brutality, distraction in Ukraine, and plain incompetence have allowed Isis to expand its reach and erode the military governments. Isis has been able to steadily infiltrate into North Africa, and this rising tide of jihadism so close to Europe is deeply concerning — not least because of the population displacement it causes and the group’s record of using migrant flows to get its operatives into Europe.

The height of Isis’s global attack campaign in the “caliphate” era is behind us, but the terror organization is not spent on this front. Last year, it proclaimed a resumption of the global campaign: a wave of attacks followed in Europe and even reached America. Isis did this largely from the Afghan node. It would seem logistically easier to use the African infrastructure, and the group seems to be thinking along these lines.

A few weeks ago in Al-Naba, the weekly newsletter in which Isis sets out its priorities and strategy, the group celebrated its war on Christians in Africa, and encouraged its troops to extend this conflict into Europe. It is a threat that cannot be ignored.

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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