The future of AI in their hands? Trump-Xi summit dismisses calls for global oversight

Two men sat at one table and decided the fate of a continent neither of them rules. The reports say they agreed on at least one thing: that no one else should hold the reins of this new thinking power. Not a treaty among nations. A division of spoils between two.

I know this arrangement. I have seen it before, in the salons of Europe, when the great powers drew lines on maps of places they had never walked. They called it order. It was arithmetic - the arithmetic of who commands, and everyone else counted as terrain.

Here is what grieves me tonight. The whole world was asked to the table, and the whole world stayed home. Every people who will live under this new force - the farmer, the clerk, the child not yet born - had no seat, no delegate, no voice. Two sovereigns concluded that oversight was premature. Premature! As if the flood waits politely for the levee to be debated.

I wrote charters for peoples who had never governed themselves, and I learned the bitter lesson: a document ahead of its people is a wish, not a law. But this is the opposite failure, and it is worse. Here the document is refused before it is even drafted. The rulers of the two great powers share exactly one conviction - that neither will submit to a common rule - and from that single agreement they will govern everything.

The liberator in me wants to cry: where is the congress? Where is the assembly of the affected? But I remember my own congresses, how they dissolved into provincial jealousies the moment the common enemy was gone. Perhaps there was never a coalition of mankind to dissolve. Perhaps there was only ever the strong, dividing what the strong could hold.

Still I write it down, because someone must record that the many were not consulted. The Andes were not asked. The sea was not asked. Only the two.

Washington, September 25, 2026.

Two emperors dined at the White House tonight, and between the fish and the toasts they agreed on the one question that matters: that no one should govern the new force but themselves. The newspapers call this a summit. I call it a division of spoons at a table where the meal has not yet been cooked.

I spent my life among statesmen who believed that power, like water, could be canalised - that treaties were the sluice-gates and congresses the reservoirs. It was a handsome theory, and it worked admirably for about forty years, which is the natural lifespan of any theory. What I observe now is a force that does not recognise the border between these two republics at all. It crosses the Pacific faster than the diplomatic pouch ever did, and the two men who claim to divide it between them are dividing something that has already left the room.

What strikes me is not the refusal to regulate - refusal was always the likeliest outcome, since no sovereign has ever volunteered a bridle for his own horse - but the unanimity of it. Rivalry, I had supposed, was the last surviving check: two powers watching each other would at least slow the pace. Instead they have discovered that the pace suits them both, and so competition, which we were taught to regard as the great disciplining force of nations, has become the great excuse. Each says the other will not slow down, therefore neither must.

I was educated to analyse such conferences as arrangements of balance. The balance is now struck between two men and a third party that sits at neither place-setting, holds no passport, and was not invited. The dinner was excellent, I have no doubt. The guests of honour numbered three, and only two were fed.

Two men dined in Washington last night and found, between them, a single point of agreement: the world may wait for common rules. The news did not surprise me. It angered me, and I want to record why.

When alternating current spread across the continents, no parliament decided its shape. The grid decided. The moment two generating stations were joined, they were forced to agree on frequency, on voltage, on the meaning of a cycle - not because committees loved harmony, but because unsynchronized systems destroy each other at the junction. Standardization was never a virtue. It was physics collecting a debt.

Start from the theoretical limit: a planetary intelligence, tested by common measure, its failures reported on a shared wire, its capabilities expressed in units any engineer in any capital can verify. Then trace the gap. The gap is two empires, each convinced that incompatibility is a weapon. They are wrong. Incompatibility is a fault line, and both capitals stand upon it.

The technical path is dull, therefore achievable: agreed units for measuring what these systems can do, disclosure of failures across borders within hours, one testing protocol the way there is one frequency. None of it requires trust between the two men at that table. It requires only that both admit what every operator of every grid admits - that the failure of one station travels down the wire to all.

The dinner was served hours after a breach on the far side of the Pacific argued the case for them: a failure in one nation’s systems, traveling. Neither man treated it as evidence. Each treated it as weather.

I spent my life insisting the future arrives first as an engineering problem, later as a political one. Here vanity reverses the order. They could synchronize. They won’t. The distance between them is not distance at all. It is appetite.