• I did a taste test of five brand-name cereals and their cheaper generic alternatives from Walmart.
• I preferred the brand-name versions of Honey Nut Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats.
• However, I actually liked the Walmart versions of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Frosted Flakes better.

A box of name-brand cereal may not seem like an especially luxurious purchase, but when you're trying to buy enough for a hungry family of four, the cost can add up.

Luckily, Walmart offers generic alternatives to practically every popular cereal brand under its Great Value label.

These "dupes" tend to be cheaper, and I wanted to see if I could save money on groceries in the future while keeping my 7-year-old and 4-year-old just as satisfied.

So, we did blind taste tests to try five famous cereals alongside their respective generic alternatives.

Here's how they stacked up, and which were worth the savings.

Prices may vary by location.

Great Value Honey Nut O's were way cheaper than Honey Nut Cheerios.

To start, we compared General Mills Honey Nut Cheerios to Great Value Honey Nut O's.

The 10.5-ounce box of Honey Nut Cheerios cost $3.68, or $0.35 an ounce. Walmart's version was significantly cheaper at $1.87 for a 12-ounce box, or $0.16 an ounce.

Out of the box, it was fairly easy to tell the difference between the two. The generic O's were a bit larger and had a lighter color than the Honey Nut Cheerios. The brand-name version also appeared to have a shiny, sugary sheen that the generic lacked.

Most of us preferred the brand-name Honey Nut Cheerios.

Of the five cereal pairs we tasted, these two options seemed the least similar. The generic version was a bit crunchier and a touch less mushy after a few minutes in milk. However, it had a starchy texture that verged on chalkiness.

Overall, the General Mills cereal had more honey flavor and a heartier, oaty taste than the generic.

My 4-year-old couldn't tell the brand from the generic by taste for most of the cereals we tested. With this one, however, she had no problem distinguishing the two. She actually preferred the generic to the Honey Nut Cheerios, possibly because she doesn't really like the taste of honey.

My 7-year-old also had no trouble telling the difference, but he and I both preferred the original.

Honey Bunches of Oats seemed to have a better mix of ingredients than the generic alternative.

This was actually my first time trying both the Post Honey Bunches of Oats and its generic alternative.

I picked up an 18-ounce box of the brand-name version for $4.93, or $0.27 an ounce. The Great Value alternative cost $2.67 for an 18-ounce box, which broke down to $0.15 an ounce.

At first glance, I could tell the Honey Bunches of Oats had a better mix of cornflakes and granola. The granola in the Walmart alternative was harder to find and clumped together.

I think brand-name Honey Bunches of Oats are worth paying extra for.

Here, too, all three of us could consistently tell the difference between the brand name and generic cereals.

The Honey Bunches of Oats were distinctly sweeter than the Walmart alternative, which I thought tasted bland and mostly reminiscent of Corn Flakes.

In this case, we all preferred the brand-name Honey Bunches of Oats and were surprised by how much we enjoyed them. The flakes were nice and sweet, and the granola added some light crunch.

Of the five cereals we tried, this one built the strongest case for paying more for the name brand.

We could easily distinguish between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and the Walmart version.

Next, we tried General Mills' Cinnamon Toast Crunch against Great Value Cinnamon Crunch.

The General Mills version cost $2.97 for a 12-ounce box, which is about $0.25 an ounce. The Great Value option was $2.98 for a larger 20.5-ounce box, or about $0.15 an ounce.

This pair was the easiest to distinguish visually among the five cereals we compared. The brand-name offering was noticeably smaller and darker, with "swirls" of cinnamon sugar on each piece.

I preferred Walmart's cinnamon cereal.

These options also tasted distinctly different to me and my 7-year-old, though my 4-year-old thought they tasted the same.

The 7-year-old preferred the Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which was a bit sweeter, crunchier, and denser. It held up a little better in milk and didn't get soggy as quickly.

In this case, I liked the generic better because it felt airier and less sweet.

The Great Value Rice Crisps were much cheaper than Kellogg's Rice Krispies.

Next up was Kellogg's Rice Krispies versus Great Value Rice Crisps.

The Kellogg's version cost me $4.98 for an 18-ounce box, making each ounce $0.28. I purchased a 12-ounce box of the Walmart version for $1.98, or $0.17 an ounce.

I noticed the generic cereal consisted of larger crisps that appeared more yellow than their brand-name counterparts.

Kellogg's Rice Krispies were a bit sweeter than the generic alternative.

I thought these two cereals tasted very similar. To me, though, the brand name was a touch sweeter, and the generic had a slight aftertaste of cardboard.

However, neither of my kids could tell the difference and I probably couldn't either without trying them side-by-side.

I preferred the Great Value version for rice-cereal treats.

I'm not usually a huge fan of Rice Krispies in a bowl of milk, but I love them in treat form. So, after tasting both cereals, we turned them into bars using marshmallows and butter.

The marshmallow flavor was strong enough to negate any difference between the two cereals. The sticky treats tasted almost exactly the same.

If I'm shopping at Walmart the next time I want to make a batch, I will definitely go with the generic option to save money.

The Great Value Frosted Flakes were significantly cheaper than the Kellogg's version.

Though Walmart's generic answer to Kellogg's Frosted Flakes goes by the same name, it represented one of the biggest discounts of the group on a per-ounce basis.

The 12-ounce box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes cost $3.98, or $0.33 an ounce. The 13.5-ounce Great Value version cost $1.93, or $0.14 an ounce.

They looked very similar, though the generic one again appeared slightly more yellow in color.

We couldn't tell the difference between the Great Value and brand-name Frosted Flakes.

These two cereals tasted almost exactly the same to us: sugary, crunchy at first, and mushy after a couple of minutes in milk.

Of the five generic cereals we tried, the Great Value Frosted Flakes were the only ones that we couldn't distinguish from the original by taste.

I thought the brand name might have had a slightly more assertive sweetness to it, but I wasn't able to pick it out reliably in our blind taste test.

In this case, I think buying the cheaper Walmart version is a no-brainer.

• The CIA has posted videos online as part of attempts to recruit Chinese officials as spies.
• The videos highlight anti-corruption purges and repression in China.
• Tensions between the US and China are ratcheting up.

The CIA has released a pair of videos online as part of efforts to recruit Chinese officials who are dissatisfied with corruption and political repression at home.

The slickly-produced Chinese-language videos show a midlevel official serving a corrupt and wealthy boss, and another showing a highly placed official anxious that he'll be caught up in one of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drives.

The videos, titled "Why I contacted the CIA: to take control of my fate" and "Why I contacted the CIA: for a better life," were posted on YouTube and other social media platforms.

In both videos, the officials are then shown contacting the CIA to escape their predicament. The videos contain information on how to securely contact the CIA via the dark web.

In a statement Thursday cited by The New York Times, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the new videos were aimed at "recruiting Chinese officials to steal secrets."

"Our agency must continue responding to this threat with urgency, creativity, and grit, and these videos are just one of the ways we are doing this," he said.

The CIA has resorted to similar techniques in the past.

The videos resemble ones posted online in recent years targeting Russian officials disaffected by corruption and the war in Ukraine, which the CIA said were successful in attracting new sources.

The CIA also released a more basic text-based video last year, also in Mandarin, giving instructions on contacting the agency via the dark web.

It has also released videos in Farsi, which is spoken in Iran, and Korean.

As part of his confirmation hearing in January, Ratcliffe said the CIA under his tenure would intensify its focus on "the threats posed by China and its ruling Chinese Communist Party."

Ratcliffe said that confronting the rise of China was the US's top strategic priority, and he told those present that the CIA would focus more efforts on human intelligence, or obtaining information directly from individuals.

China has also been accused of waging a widespread espionage campaign in the US, aimed at stealing technological, military, and industrial secrets.

According to a survey of Chinese espionage incidents since 2000, compiled by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, this involves hacking, gaining secrets from human sources, and influence campaigns.

It was a chilly night in Berkeley, California this past November when Sarah decided to stop by a buzzy after-party for an AI conference called The Curve. A year and a half ago, the 27-year-old had left her lucrative job as a trader in London to look for work in AI safety, which she considers the most important issue in the world, and she was eager to connect with others who felt the same. She certainly didn't expect to end the evening vilified as a Chinese spy.

At the party, the topic du jour was a recent article in The Economist, provocatively titled, "Is Xi Jinping an AI doomer?" Sarah, who was born in China a few hours from Shanghai, discussed the question with various AI researchers and policy analysts. Then one exchange turned sour.

"There's been rumors of espionage in Silicon Valley," Sarah recalled one person saying, "Like people preying on young, male, impressionable software engineers." The guy looked at Sarah. Uncomfortable, she excused herself from the conversation.

"I'm a Chinese national, but it's not like I'm a spy," she later recounted to another attendee.

Her comment was overheard by Samuel Hammond, an economist at the Foundation for American Innovation and an AI policy advisor for Project 2025. He posted it to X, where it attracted millions of views.

"So definitely a spy?" read one reply on X. "She was from Beijing and had a very posh accent," responded Hammond. (Sarah is from an entirely different part of China.) Other partygoers piled onto the speculation. "I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought that," one said. Another insisted: "I can't dismiss the idea that she was CCP… If there's a plausible risk, & there is, she shouldn't be allowed in."

Sarah, who asked that I use just her first name, replied on X to clear up the confusion about why she left the conversation — it was cold and she had already been asked the same question by other people — but by then the exchange had reached escape velocity, spilling out across Silicon Valley. "Everyone knows," she said about the encounter. "I had to stop going to networking events. I just wanted this thing to die down."

As the race to develop advanced AI systems before China does ramps up, a new Red Scare has taken over the tech world. I spoke with Chinese workers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional, personal, or legal repercussions, and found that Sarah's experience was far from rare. The same fear of Chinese espionage that forced TikTok to shut down is now pushing out Chinese-born AI professionals at the exact moment that American AI experts report a critical talent shortage in the field.

Concerns over Chinese spying have been on the rise since the early 2010s, when the US escalated its efforts to address Chinese cyberattacks. In 2018, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump undertook a controversial "China Initiative," which aimed to prevent industrial espionage in the research community by investigating hundreds of academics suspected of having ties to China. It found only a few cases of actual spying.

The plurality of investigations, Bloomberg and MIT Technology Review reported in 2021, involved undisclosed funding and affiliations to Chinese institutions, while "just three claim that secrets were handed over to Chinese agents," Bloomberg wrote. Instead of catching spies, many cases just indicted professors for bureaucratic oversights — those found guilty claimed they didn't disclose their funding because they didn't think they had to.

The China Initiative's slipshod approach upended many people's lives. Gang Chen, a nanotechnologist, and Anming Hu, a physicist, were both US-based tenured professors who were arrested by the FBI, only for authorities to later realize they had made a mistake. During the yearlong investigations, Chen was barred from his university's campus, and Hu was suspended without pay and his work authorization revoked. (Though both were later reinstated to their positions, Chen said he would no longer take federal research funding). The suicide of the neuroscientist Jane Ying Wu last year came after a China Initiative investigation shut down her lab.

The Biden administration escalated Trump's competitive approach toward China. The 2022 CHIPS Act, which aimed to bolster domestic production of semiconductors, the essential hardware powering AI, also restricted US investments, manufacturing, and research collaborations in China. Last April, Biden signed a bipartisan bill ordering the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok on grounds of national security.

Now, the fear of espionage has shifted to Silicon Valley. In June last year, AI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner said he was fired from OpenAI for sharing concerns about foreign espionage with the OpenAI board. He then published a paper-cum-manifesto titled "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead," about the race to AGI, or artificial general intelligence — what he calls the "most powerful weapon mankind has ever created," comparable to nuclear weapons. "If we're lucky, we'll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we're unlucky, an all-out war," he wrote. In a section called "The Free World Must Prevail," Aschenbrenner paints a dystopian scenario where the Chinese Communist Party steals model weights and algorithms and uses them to target "advanced bioweapons" at "anybody but Han Chinese," "individually assess every citizen for dissent," and "enforce the Party's conception of 'truth.'" The paper was widely circulated in Silicon Valley and even shared to X by Ivanka Trump. (OpenAI has said the concerns Aschenbrenner shared with the board were not the reason he was fired.)

The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen entertained a similar thought experiment last March. "Let's assume that AI in 2024 is like atomic technology in 1943," he wrote on X. "What we see is the security equivalent of swiss cheese. My own assumption is that all such American AI labs are fully penetrated and that China is getting nightly downloads of all American AI research and code RIGHT NOW."

In response to mounting concerns, the Financial Times reported that Google, OpenAI, and several other US tech companies have tightened personnel screening. Some startups are turning to third-party tools like Strider Technologies, which scours public data to investigate individuals' connections to "state-sponsored risk," as Strider's website puts it. If a current or prospective employee is flagged by Strider's AI, FT reported that its "due diligence" process will then investigate their "family or financial links abroad as well as their travel history."

A spokesperson for Google said they hadn't stepped up their screening processes and told me that the company has "strict safeguards" for preventing the theft of trade secrets, "none of which are based on employees' nationality." OpenAI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Meanwhile, members of the Chinese diaspora in Silicon Valley are feeling the strain and paranoia of geopolitical tensions pressing on their social and professional lives. One 26-year-old woman who works at a San Francisco startup said she was once called a "honeypot" by a dance partner at a local bar. "He told me he worked on a nuclear-related company," she said. "He was like, 'I cannot share anything with you. Are you looking at my phone? You don't seem like a honeypot, but I have to be careful given that you're a Chinese national.'"

As a tech worker, she has turned down AI-related job opportunities to avoid scrutiny for herself and her family from both the US and Chinese governments. She also tries to downplay her Chinese accent and cultural identity. "A lot of Chinese nationals don't agree with the Chinese government" on issues like Uyghur repression in Xinjiang, she said. "But in social situations, you have to vocalize it passionately just to lower the guard people have toward you."

Sarah affirmed this sentiment. She hoped to contribute to global AI safety work by bridging the information gap between Chinese- and English-language researchers and policymakers, but the hawkish environment has made collaboration difficult. "Whenever you say anything neutral about China, people will think, 'That's pro-China, and this person is bought by the CCP,'" she said.

Many Chinese startup founders are also deemphasizing their nationality. One founder of a consumer AI startup told me that an investor asked her to remove the word "China" from a pitch deck and replace it with "Asia." It's a notable shift from the start of the century when top venture-capital firms were eager to invest in Chinese super-apps and open China-based funds.

HeyGen, a generative-AI startup founded in Shenzhen, dissolved its Chinese operation to rebrand and relocate to the US in 2023. It asked its Chinese investors to sell their equity, then raised a new Series A round from US- and UK-based funds to more easily purchase semiconductors under the CHIPS Act. One of HeyGen's original Chinese investors told me that it's now common for Chinese founders to turn down Chinese capital to avoid US governmental scrutiny.

Similarly, the TechCrunch journalist Rita Liao wrote that a Chinese company refused her coverage because her byline made them look "too Chinese." She said another Chinese founder told her: "We work for no government. We just want to build businesses."

Several people I spoke with described their situation as a "double bind." On one hand, they came to the US to pursue opportunities and liberties that Chinese society didn't afford them. But these days, eerily similar state and social sanctions are intruding on their work.

In some cases, the tensions are making it difficult for people from China to stay in the US. Ordinarily, foreign workers on visas who temporarily leave the US must get a stamp from a local US consulate before reentering. But more tech workers are being put through extra processing required for people working in sensitive industries before they can reenter the US, resulting in some people getting stranded abroad for months or years.

On forums for Chinese nationals, anxious students and professionals fret about how to avoid extended processing. "I work as a machine learning engineer in the Bay Area," reads one post from October. "I work on some AI product applications and do no core AI research. I thought that 'sensitive fields' referred to advanced defense research, but now I heard that any STEM field can be subject to checks. I'm feeling panicked."

Unlucky visa holders who get flagged have no choice but to appeal for an extended leave of absence from their university or workplace. One AI Ph.D. student wrote in November, "I have now waited for more than 130 days. My school has deferred me for one semester, but I cannot defer it again."

As tensions ramp up, many Chinese tech workers are reconsidering whether the American dream is worth the risk. When Microsoft offered its China-based employees a chance to relocate to another country, tensions between the US and China made some reluctant to take the offer, according to reporting by Rest of World. Going viral on X turned out to be a tipping point for Sarah. She returned to China in December. "Initially I was afraid of trouble on the Chinese side, but it turns out that the other side is more problematic," she said about the US.

Meanwhile, the US faces a critical talent shortage in AI. A 2021 report by the National Security Commission on AI found that the number of US-born STEM and AI doctorates is not nearly keeping pace with the industry's growth. While 42% of top-tier AI researchers worked in the US in 2022, only 18% of them received their undergraduate degree here, Macro Polo's AI Talent Tracker found. China is currently the largest source of these top-tier researchers — and more are choosing to stay in China.

"For the first time in our lifetime, the United States risks losing the competition for talent on the scientific frontiers," the NSCAI report says. "Immigration reform is a national security imperative."

Divyansh Kaushik, a tech and national security expert at Beacon Global Strategies, told me that America needs policies that are a "scalpel, not a sledgehammer." He recognizes the risk of espionage, citing China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which legally obligates all Chinese citizens to "support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work." But Kaushik considers blanket bans on foreign nationals just as counterproductive. He instead pointed to policies that restrict students from specific Chinese-military-affiliated universities from obtaining visas. "There will be false positives and false negatives," but the US can mitigate the risk without overreaching, he told me.

Other experts believe that nationality-based anti-espionage efforts are more security theater than reality. Yangyang Cheng, a physicist and China researcher at Yale Law School, told me that AI risks "are not exclusive to Chinese firms or unique products of the Chinese authoritarian system." She cited examples of American professors who helped build biometric technologies for ethnic oppression in Xinjiang, arguing that we should be focused on preventing harm wherever it originates. She thinks the TikTok ban makes the same mistakes. "The focus on the Chinese government's subpoena power overlooks the many ways American companies cooperate with the state," she wrote for Wired.

It's unclear what stance this Trump administration will take. Some in Silicon Valley are hopeful that the president-elect will expand the visa program for high-skilled immigrants. During a recent intra-Republican fight over H-1B visas, Trump aligned with Elon Musk, telling supporters: "We need smart people coming into our country." But Trump's 2016 term oversaw higher costs, longer wait times, and increased denial rates for H-1B applicants. During a private dinner conversation in 2018 reported by Politico, Trump said, referring to China, "almost every student that comes over to this country is a spy."

Those who are staying in the US, meanwhile, say they feel exhausted. "I've been in the US for almost a decade," a Chinese-born data scientist and UC Berkeley graduate told me. "Many of us left to escape that political environment, and are the most liberal-leaning Chinese you can find. We spend so much time going through the American education and immigration system — and now the US says it doesn't welcome us either. It feels like we have this talent that no one wants."

Jasmine Sun is a writer covering tech, politics, and culture from San Francisco. She publishes a weekly newsletter on the "anthropology of disruption."