Nicole Shanahan, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s running mate, said she was considering suspending their campaign in order to help Donald Trump win the US election during a podcast appearance released today.

In a conversation with Tom Bilyeu, the vice-presidential candidate said she and Kennedy could stay in the race in the hopes of winning enough votes to establish a strong third party for future elections, but acknowledged this would run the risk of ushering in a Harris-Walz presidency by drawing votes from Trump. The other option, she said, is to ‘walk away right now and join forces with Donald Trump’.

While Shanahan insisted that ‘technically… we could absolutely win’, her comments suggest that she’s reconciled herself to an almost certain defeat. ‘We just have to keep being honest,’ she said. ‘I need to focus on a vision that goes beyond November.’

RFK’s VP Nicole Shanahan says they are debating whether to stay in the race or drop out and join forces with Trump:

‘There’s two options that we’re looking at and one is staying in, forming that new party, but we run the risk of a Kamala Harris and Waltz presidency because we… pic.twitter.com/O3HrLbbCLO

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This acknowledgement is unusual even among long-shot candidates, as is her deference to her Republican opponent. But while the RFK-Shanahan ticket may be running against Trump, Shanahan appears to view Harris as the more serious threat, both to their campaign and to the country. She blamed the DNC for ‘sabotage’ and ‘lawfare’ against their third-party ticket, and claimed the DNC ‘planted insiders into our campaign to disrupt it and to create actual legal issues for us’.

‘We are taking a very serious look at making sure that the people that have corrupted our fair and free democracy do not end up in office in November,’ Shanahan added. ‘I really wanted a fair shot at this election, and I believed in the America that I, a little girl, pledged an allegiance to. And that is not where we are today, and it’s not because of the Republican Party taking us out, it is exclusively because of the Democratic Party taking us out.’

RFK Jr reportedly made an offer to Trump to drop out of the race in exchange for a cabinet position in the latter’s administration, then made a similar offer to Harris following a rejection from the GOP. Shanahan, for her part, said in today’s interview that she has not ruled out running for governor of California, another apparent admission that the campaign is unlikely to succeed. The campaign has raised $51 million in this election cycle, and the American Values 2024 PAC that supports Kennedy has raised $50 million. The independent candidate’s polls peaked at 16% in July before falling down to 12% after Biden exited the race, according to RealClearPolitics polls.

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is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

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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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