During his State of the Union address during the first week of March, President Trump declared: “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America.”

Just days later, his government decided to deport a Palestinian-American permanent resident from the country who was involved in protests against Israel’s government at Columbia University. Mahmoud Khalil, who was a graduate student at the school and a green card holder, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials over the weekend. “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” the White House tweeted today, using the traditional Hebrew greeting and goodbye.

Already on shaky legal ground, the Trump administration is being vague about what exactly Khalil was arrested for. On his social media platform, President Trump called Khalil a “Radical Foreign Pro-Hamas Student” and pledged to “find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.”

Expressing viewpoints that are critical of the government of Israel is not a crime. Even expressing rhetorical support for Hamas would not be considered a crime (although it’s unclear if Khalil actually did this, anyway).

In taking this step, the Trump administration is likely trying to rally its political constituencies. Miriam Adelson, widower of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was one of Trump’s largest donors, spending as much as $100 million to support him. The Adelsons have long feared that America’s youth, especially young Jews, were drifting away from Israel.

In the past, this led them to fund Birthright trips for American Jews they feared had lost their connection to Israel; now, it means supporting Republican politicians who will actively suppress protests against Israel.

Defenders of the Trump administration may point to censorship from the previous administration — including leaning on major social media firms to curtail content on issues like Covid-19. And to his credit, shortly after taking office, Trump signed into law an executive order prohibiting such pressure on firms. The executive order states that “no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

But in imposing its crackdowns on speech related to Israel — including by launching a civil rights investigation of the University of California system and withholding $400 million in federal funds from Columbia — the administration may end up doing exactly the opposite of what it promised.

The Trump administration’s moves are likely to make martyrs out of the handful of students they target for deportation. At the same time, it risks driving many Americans who ordinarily couldn’t care less about the Middle East into standing against them out of concern for due process and civil liberties. While few Americans could find Jerusalem on a map, not many more want the government to decide what we can and can’t say about the conflict over the Holy Land.

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Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, The Intercept, and the Center for American Progress.

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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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