Trump-XI summit aims to head off an AI arms race

Treaties between giants have a familiar floor plan. At Tordesillas in 1494, two crowns drew a line across a world neither had seen and called the partition peace; the peoples living on it were not consulted, being reckoned part of the estate. As at Tordesillas, so in 2026.

Two sovereigns meet to head off a race for the new power. I do not doubt the sincerity; I have read too many communiqués to trust it. What endured from Reagan and Gorbachev was not rapport - rapport evaporates with its owners - but the inspection regime raised afterward: the counting, the verification, the institution that outlived the handshake. A covenant is architecture. Friendship is paint.

Here is the difficulty. Missiles can be counted. Foundations cannot. The new power is not a warhead in a silo, visible from above; it is poured nightly in private, in structures whose blueprints are themselves secrets. What does one inspect? Who inspects? The treaty will limit what is declared. Nothing limits what is built below the declared ground.

Mark, too, who sits at the table and who is the table. Two states, holding between them command of the most consequential instrument since gunpowder, undertake to settle its governance; the rest of the world is not a party but the terrain. The Congress of Vienna mapped Europe without asking Europe. The map held for a hundred years, and every year of it was mortgaged to the mapmakers.

Who answers for a race suspended between two, when the capacity to resume it belongs to neither’s successor? The summit will produce a communiqué; excavators in a century will find the ceremonial stone at the surface and the true foundation elsewhere. Peace between the strong is not restraint. It is a deed of partition.

The chroniclers of my city record a peace worth remembering: Lodi, 1454. Four powers exhausted by war agreed to spare one another, and for forty years Italy knew order, because Lorenzo the Magnificent held the balance and every state watched every other. The peace died in 1494, when Charles VIII brought over the Alps an army of a kind the treaty never contemplated. Treaties govern the wars men expect. Fortune sends the ones they do not.

So I read that the two princes meet to spare the world a race in these new machines, and the flatterers invoke the American and the Soviet who stepped back from the fire forty years ago. I ask the only question that matters: what is there to count? Atomic weapons demanded ore, furnaces, tests visible from the sky. These machines are made of thought; they multiply in a cellar; no inspector sees them. A pact that cannot be verified is a fortress of paper - it protects nothing, but persuades its builders they are safe.

Let each prince sign with the fox and arm with the lion. The one who disarms in fact while his rival disarms only in words has lost before the ceremony ends.

Yet I note one novelty. The men who build these machines serve profit and reputation, not either prince - mercenaries, by every test I know. But mercenaries usually flee the fire. Here the fire burns their own houses too; the makers live inside the danger they sell. Skin in the game, at last, on both sides of the wall. This gives me more hope than the princes’ handshake.

A republic would do better than either throne: bind itself publicly before its citizens, who keep faith longer than any prince, and never praise peace while neglecting its own arms. The ruler who trusts a rival’s word alone has made fortune his general. She is a poor one.

September 26, 2026.

This morning a woman in a village outside Ryazan rose before light, fed the stove, and went out to check whether the frost had taken her potatoes. She does not know that in another hemisphere two old men are meeting today to decide how the thinking machines shall be divided between their empires. The frost does not know either. The frost does its work regardless.

They call it an arms race, and the word comforts them, because an arms race is a familiar thing - it has rules, it has historians, it has treaties with long names. But consider what is actually being raced for: machines that read and write and decide faster than any human can, placed in the hands of the same governments that once raced for powder and uranium. The powder killed bodies. The uranium killed cities. These machines will not kill - not at first. They will first decide, and the killing will follow the deciding as the harvest follows the seed, and no one will be able to say afterward which decision was the fatal one.

The newspapers invoke Reagan and Gorbachev, as if rapport between two powerful men were the thing that turned the world from the edge. I have read enough history to distrust this. It was not the charm of two statesmen that stayed the hand of annihilation; it was the accumulated terror of a hundred million sleepless people, and the statesmen merely signed what the terror had already written.

Still, let them meet. Let them dine. Perhaps fear will do its slow work on them as it did on their predecessors.

The woman in Ryazan will dig her potatoes today. If the frost spares them, she will eat through the winter.

And the machines? Who feeds them, and who is fed by them - and did anyone ask her?