Did breakthrough in US fentanyl crisis start in China?
As Donald Trump travels to Beijing this week, fentanyl – and China’s role in its supply chain – remains an enduring point of acrimony in bilateral relations.At a UN meeting in March, the US again accused China of failing to stop its chemical industry selling the precursors required to make the potent synthetic opioid, while China suggested the US was shifting the blame for its domestic drug problem.Yet there are growing signs that the US fentanyl crisis has turned a corner – and some experts believe that interventions made in China have played a key role.“There was a supply shock: the purity of fentanyl fell,” said Keith Humphreys, a professor at Stanford University.“The question is why was there a supply shock.
And most indicators point to China.”On returning to the White House, Trump made fentanyl a foreign policy priority and quickly designated the criminal groups trafficking it as foreign terrorist organisations while slapping tariffs on countries involved in its supply chain – including China, the main source of fentanyl precursors, many of which are basic chemicals with legitimate uses.But by the summer of 2023 – during the Biden administration – overdose deaths at the national level had already begun to fall.By November 2025, they were down by more than a third.Investigators are still trying to unpick the factors behind the fall, but one theory put forward by Humphreys and his co-authors in a recent study published by Science links it to interventions in China that may have caused a long-lasting disruption to the fentanyl supply chain.
The authors point to a dramatic fall in the purity of fentanyl being seized by US law enforcement from May 2023 to the end of 2024 – the latest data publicly available – which correlates with the fall in overdose deaths,There was a similar fall in purity in Canada, which is a distinct fentanyl market, suggesting the cause might originate where they both source their precursors: China,The idea that the flow of precursors was disrupted is supported by reports from 2024 of cartel cooks struggling to source them, while new and strange adulterants appeared in the fentanyl on US streets, suggesting those cooks might have been experimenting with alternative synthesis pathways,But there are big caveats,For one, it is difficult to pinpoint which of China’s self-reported interventions might be responsible.
And then it is also unclear that the fall in purity is what actually caused the fall in overdose deaths.Nonetheless, Liu Pengyu, the spokesperson at the Chinese embassy in Washington, said in a statement that China was glad to see fentanyl overdose deaths had decreased and noted that the US government’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment “implies that Chinese government efforts have made [a] contribution to addressing the fentanyl problem in the US”.Henrietta Levin, who was director for China on Biden’s national security council, said her former colleagues saw the Science paper as showing that their pressure on China had worked.“I think China could have done more,” said Levin.“But what they did do mattered.
”Further supply side interventions are likely to be on the agenda at this week’s summit.Ideally, said Levin, these would include China changing laws to make it easier to prosecute drug trafficking, and more action from its commerce ministry to really control the behaviour of chemical companies.“A lot of this comes down to enforcement,” said Levin.“China announced export controls [on various fentanyl precursors], and that’s important.But Chinese chemical companies are gauging how serious the government is about actually enforcing those restrictions.
”Yet history shows that, so long as the demand is there, supply shocks are always temporary – and can have unpredictable effects, even making things worse.Indeed, it was only after China put a blanket ban on fentanyl in 2019 that the supply chain evolved to loop Mexico’s cartels in, who began to import precursors from China and then traffic the finished product over the US-Mexico border, almost entirely replacing their previous trade in heroin.“There’s a kind of myopia here,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, director of the University of North Carolina’s opioid data lab.“That time, the geopolitics of it backfired.”Additional research by Yu-chen Li
Google announces raft of free upgrades for Android phones
Google has announced a range of features coming to Android phones this year, including a new Gemini Intelligence AI system and a tool to help users avoid distracting apps.Revealed in a livestreamed “Android Show” event, the free upgrades are scheduled to arrive in waves over the next year for high-end new and old phones alike, including Samsung and Pixel devices. Google also revealed that a new lineup of laptops will arrive in the autumn.Gemini Intelligence will combine the company’s top AI tools into one system aimed at being more proactively useful.It will be able to automate tasks by directly interacting with the apps already on a phone
Head of Microsoft’s Israel branch to step down after inquiry into dealings with Israeli military
The head of Microsoft’s Israeli subsidiary will step down in the wake of an inquiry that has scrutinised its business dealings with the Israeli military.Microsoft ordered the inquiry last year in response to a Guardian investigation revealing the military had used the company’s technology to operate a powerful surveillance system that collected Palestinian civilian phone calls on a mass scale.The joint investigation with the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call found the military’s elite spy agency, Unit 8200, had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform to store a vast trove of intercepted calls from Gaza and the West Bank.The inquiry commissioned by Microsoft is understood to have recently concluded. Its findings are unclear; however, sources familiar with the situation said they prompted an announcement last week that Microsoft Israel’s general manager, Alon Haimovich, would leave the company
GameStop’s $55.5bn bid for eBay rejected as ‘neither credible nor attractive’
The board of eBay has rejected the US video games retailer GameStop’s surprise $55.5bn bid (£41bn) for the online marketplace, describing the proposal as “neither credible nor attractive”.Earlier this month, GameStop made an unsolicited bid for eBay, publishing a letter on its website outlining a half-cash, half-stock proposal.This was despite the US games company – which became a global household name during the meme stock craze of 2021 – being worth far less than its takeover target. GameStop had a market valuation of roughly $12bn before its bid, almost a quarter of eBay’s $46bn valuation
Trump heads to China to spread the gospel of American tech
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian.Donald Trump is headed to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran.On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, would join Trump
Trump heads to China to spread the gospel of American tech while emulating Xi Jinping on AI
Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran.On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president. Other guests from the tech sphere include Meta’s recently appointed president, Dina Powell McCormick; Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of computer memory maker Micron; Chuck Robbins, CEO of longtime telecom giant Cisco; and Cristiano Amon, CEO of semiconductor maker Qualcomm, according to a White House official.Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO – who is close to Trump but criticized the US’s limitations on chip sales to China in an April interview, saying that he didn’t want a “loser mentality” to cost the US its edge in AI – will not be joining the president
Molière Ex Machina: AI used to create ‘new work’ by beloved French playwright
Molière is to the French what Shakespeare is to the English: the last word in historical literature, drama, wit and satire.Now, more than 350 years after his death, the 17th-century dramatist has been revived after scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris used artificial intelligence to help write an experimental play in his style.L’Astrologue ou les Faux Présages (The Astrologer, or False Omens), a three-act comedy, made its debut at the Royal Opera at the Château de Versailles last week.The two-hour play tells the story of a wealthy bourgeois Parisian who, under the instruction of a charlatan astrologer called Pseudoramus, insists his daughter Lucile marry a debt-ridden and elderly wigmaker.While the theme could well have been dreamed up by Molière, the dialogue, music, costumes and scenery were all created with the help of a French AI tool called Le Chat (The Cat)
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Did breakthrough in US fentanyl crisis start in China?
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