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

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?