Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen use this "Behind the Curtain" column to synthesize a flurry of news showing the U.S. faces rising AI competition across Asia and Europe:

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance issued a rare joint warning this week that frontier AI capable of crippling governments and businesses is close. The fast rise of Chinese and Japanese models helps explain the urgency and fear, officials tell us.

• Why it matters: Yes, Anthropic's Mythos model is the most cyber-lethal threat in the world. But OpenAI is close here in America. And China and Japan, using much cheaper models, have gotten closer, faster than intelligence agencies anticipated.

"The timeline is not years, it is months," Five Eyes warned.

• Five Eyes, composed of the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is considered the world's most comprehensive and powerful spy network.

🖼️ The big picture: President Trump told Marc Caputo on "The Axios Show" that "we're beating China by a lot" on AI. But that lead, which U.S. leaders and businesses have been banking on, is eroding.

Three new disruptions show just how fast it's happening:

1. It's becoming harder to put up a wall around America's advancements. Japan's Sakana AI launched Fugu Ultra, an orchestrator that it claims offers "frontier capability without the risk of export controls" by switching between publicly available models. The Tokyo-based company says it can reach Mythos-level performance by using U.S. labs' work as interchangeable infrastructure.
2. China is eating away at that lead by stealing America's best work. In February, Anthropic accused DeepSeek, Minimax and Moonshot of illicitly training their own models via "distillation," using thousands of accounts to have millions of exchanges with Claude — a cheap shortcut to years of pricey research.
3. American labs are wondering whether the frontier is worth the risk. Two weeks ago, the Commerce Department export-controlled Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5, leading the company to shut off access for everyone. The best domestic AI companies may be wary to show off their highest-capability models, fearing further government intervention.

Between the lines: China's open-source models are gaining ground fast. Z.ai's GLM-5.2 is the buzziest right now.

• An LLM leaderboard by Artificial Analysis, a benchmarking company, puts GLM-5.2 alongside OpenAI's GPT-5.5, at about a fifth of the cost to run. When it comes to coding, Arena's web development ranking has the Chinese model second only to Fable — making it the best-performing model you can actually use right now.

Alex Stamos, former Facebook chief security officer, told Axios Future of Cybersecurity's Sam Sabin that it's quite possible the Chinese "have things privately that are really, really good. [It] is arrogant and foolish of us to think that just because we're American that we've got the best stuff."

• He added that Chinese military hackers are likely "laughing hilariously right now at the Americans fighting between themselves and cutting each other off left and right."

🔭 Zoom out: It's Europe, too. Domyn — an AI company based in Milan, Italy — announced last week that its Europa project is a frontier open-source AI model that will support all 24 official languages of the European Union.

• Domyn (formerly iGenius, which was described as the Ferrari of AI) collaborated with Nvidia to build Colosseum, billed as Europe's largest AI supercomputer.

👀 What we're watching: The Five Eyes call to action said a "whole-of-society response is required" to respond to the accelerating cyber risk.

• "Boards and executives should ensure cyber resilience is in place and works under pressure," the bulletin says. "It is not enough to have controls. Leaders must be confident those controls will perform during a real incident. This requires reassessing long-standing trade-offs and using AI deliberately to strengthen defense — not just improve efficiency."

The bottom line: America's AI lead is real but shrinking. Every move to protect it only hands rivals another reason to route around it — all while the capabilities that have Five Eyes on edge are already loose, downloadable and impossible to recall.

• Axios' Shane Savitsky and Sam Sabin contributed reporting.

📈 If you're a CEO or on a CEO's team: Ask to join Jim's new weekly Axios C-Suite newsletter.

• Share this column.

Mamdani as kingmaker: House Democrats were stunned last night when two of their colleagues — including the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — lost primaries to left-wing challengers backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Axios' Andrew Solender writes.

Why it matters: The New York primary results are expected to double the Democratic Socialists of America bloc in Congress.

• Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) told us: "People who do not support the DSA wring their hands at cocktail parties, while the DSA is organizing."

🔎 Zoom in: Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) lost reelection in a 66% to 34% landslide to progressive former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

• Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), the Hispanic Caucus chair, lost his primary more narrowly to democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier.
• In the race to succeed retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), democratic socialist state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez scored a double-digit victory over the Brooklyn borough president.

Between the lines: Mamdani backed all three winners: Lander, Avila Chevalier and Valdez. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) endorsed Espaillat and Goldman.

• Keep reading.

👉 The AI race: New York state Assemblyman Micah Lasher won a crowded Democratic primary for the Manhattan congressional seat left open by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler, beating Alex Bores, a state assemblyman and former Palantir employee.

• Bores helped pass the nation's first major AI-safety law and ran on reining in the industry. The race drew more than $20 million in spending from AI interests.

By the numbers: Lasher got 39% and Bores got 35%. Jack Schlossberg, a political novice and grandson of President John F. Kennedy, finished with only 11% of the vote (11,000 votes out of 102,000). Go deeper.

🗳️ More takeaways ... AP results from New York ... Maryland ... South Carolina ... Utah.

AI investor and "All-In" Podcast co-host Chamath Palihapitiya tells Dan Primack on "The Axios Show" that an AI job apocalypse makes for an "incredible headline" but ignores how humans have adapted to past tech shocks.

• The Social Capital CEO rejected the idea that AI and robotics will wipe out work — even for plumbers.
• Palihapitiya asks who will run the plumbing business or the robotics company. Humans will still need shelter, food, clothing and, yes, bathrooms.

Palihapitiya points to past technological transitions that let humans multiply the number of tasks they do in a day.

• "I suspect if you just trend it, that 35 things now goes to 300 things over the next thousand years," he said. "There's going to be more ways in which we allocate time."

Watch the first clip.

President Trump visited a Mack Trucks facility near Allentown, Pa., yesterday for a 2024-style rally in one of the nation's most competitive congressional districts.

• First-term incumbent Rep. Ryan Mackenzie (R-Pa.) is running against Democratic challenger Bob Brooks, president of the state firefighters' union. More on the speech.

Above: Mobile surveillance cameras and additional lighting have been installed along the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

• Go deeper: Trump blames vandals for reflecting pool problems. Internal records tell another story. (NYT gift link)

New polling shows America's standing abroad is sliding as the Trump administration threatens a wholesale reordering of the trans-Atlantic relationship, Axios' Mike Zapler and Josephine Walker write.

• Why it matters: Pew's findings, out yesterday, capture how allies increasingly view Washington as unreliable, self-interested and less committed to global cooperation.

🧮 By the numbers: A median of 76% of people across 36 countries have no confidence in Trump, according to Pew.

• About 57% view the U.S. unfavorably, and around 50% call it an unreliable partner.
• Among traditional allies, faith in the U.S. as a reliable partner has cratered since 2022 — down 52 points in Sweden, 48 in Canada and 47 in the Netherlands.

Share this story ... More on the polling.

Investors hit pause on the AI run-up, with chip stocks slumping from their record highs, Axios Markets author Emily Peck writes.

• Why it matters: We're in a bit of a reality-check moment in the AI buildout — both for businesses blowing their budgets on compute, and for investors bidding up stock prices for any company engaged in the new technology.

The tech-focused Nasdaq 100 index slid 3.3% yesterday. The broader S&P 500 closed 1.4% lower, after a selloff in South Korea got investors skittish about the high-flying chip stocks.

• Keep reading.

Axios Fort Lauderdale and Axios Hollywood in Florida launched this week as Axios Local's newest cities.

• Axios Local is now in 39 cities, with full-time journalists on the ground helping readers get smarter, faster about where they live.

🐅 Coming soon: Axios Cincinnati + North of Cincinnati.

• Get Axios Hollywood ... Fort Lauderdale ... 37 more local cities.

The World Cup is producing goals at a pace not seen since 1958.

• Each match is averaging just over 3 goals so far — 23% more scoring than the same span of games in the last World Cup.

AP pinpoints three factors driving the high-scoring games:

1. ⚽ The ball: It's built with deep seams to produce "optimal in-flight stability." Players and coaches say it's flying at goalkeepers at high velocity.
2. ⏱️ Longer games: New hydration breaks have led to more stoppage time, opening up extra scoring chances.
3. 🌎 A bigger tournament: The expanded 48-team format, debuting this year, has widened the talent gap between teams.

Go deeper.