Last week the UK Government acknowledged the national security threat posed by China. As a result, hawks have been quick to criticize Beijing’s absence from the “enhanced tier” of Britain’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS), which came into effect on Tuesday. On this, they are correct: China should be placed on the top tier. In this new world of great power struggles, so too should the United States.

FIRS is designed to bring transparency to foreign influence efforts in the UK. The “standard tier” requires the registration of any political influence activities, such as lobbying, at the direction of any foreign government apart from the Republic of Ireland. The “enhanced tier” goes significantly further. It requires the registration of “relevant activities” (including commerce, research, and attendance of events) conducted by specified foreign-controlled entities or individuals and organizations at the direction of specified foreign powers. As currently specified, it provides a basis for mapping the activity of Russian and Iranian state-linked actors in the UK.

Mapping China’s activity in the UK in this way would go a long way towards enabling Britain to develop a more coherent and systematic China policy. A major obstacle to this has been the fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is active in all elements of Chinese society. That makes it impossible to do business with Chinese companies, engage in academic collaboration with Chinese institutions, or work with any kind of Chinese organization without interacting with the Party-state.

Economic, academic, and other collaborations with Chinese counterparts are in the interests of many British individuals and organizations, as well as Britain as a nation — provided they are conducted with an awareness of the CCP’s approach.

Influence operations abroad form a key part of that approach. Most of the time, these operations consist of gradually forging personal ties, cultivating business relationships, gathering freely available information, and persuading foreign interlocutors of CCP talking points. That is, Chinese influence operations rely on interactions that are perfectly normal, legal, and necessary in a democratic society. This makes it very difficult to track the nature and extent of Chinese influence efforts. That is, unless one requires the registration of all activities of Chinese state-linked entities, as inclusion on the enhanced tier of FIRS would.

Opposition from within the government to including China alongside Russia and Iran was apparently motivated by the risks it could pose to bilateral business ties. Undoubtedly this would impact an economic relationship which is worth Britain pursuing. But the impact would likely be temporary, and could be offset significantly by recasting the purpose of FIRS from a system for monitoring the influence of declared adversaries to one for navigating the realities of great power competition.

Which is why the US should also be included on the enhanced tier. Many are rightly worried about Chinese influence in the UK, but China’s footprint pales into insignificance in comparison with America’s. The objection that US entities are less beholden to Washington than their Chinese counterparts are to Beijing is becoming less and less persuasive. Satellite company Maxar, for example, cut off Ukraine’s access to imagery in compliance with the Trump administration’s directive and European leaders openly fear that Washington could coercively leverage its dominance of Big Tech.

China’s rise as a great power has allowed it to extend its influence globally and pursue the CCP’s ends. The flip side is that the US is no longer hegemonic but becoming more like a “normal” great power. This means it will increasingly resort to coercive measures to achieve its aims, given it no longer possesses the power to enforce a rules-based order.

Britain now finds itself in a world of competing superpowers. In FIRS, it has an effective tool for monitoring and responding to their influence. Doing so will require the political will and strategic foresight to risk short-term backlash from Beijing and Washington in order to pursue long-term strategic autonomy.

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William Matthews is a researcher specialising in China and the international order. He has a background in anthropology and comparative social science and writes on Substack.

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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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