On: Three takeaways from Trump's 'Super Intelligence' summit

October 1, 2026

They held a summit at the White House about thinking machines. The men who built the machines came to Washington to ask the government to regulate the machines. Now I’ve been around livestock all my life, and I never once saw a fella sell a bull and then beg the buyer to build a stronger fence.

That’s the part that gets me. These are the same men who spent ten years telling us their product was going to save the world, cure disease, end poverty, and probably fix my back. And now they stand in the East Room saying it’s so dangerous somebody ought to do something. Well, which is it, boys? You can’t sell me a horse as gentle and then warn me he bites.

And the government, bless it, held a summit. A summit is where powerful people fly in, eat a nice lunch, agree that the problem is serious, and fly home having accomplished the formation of a committee. The committee will study it. The study will take four years. The machines, I’m told, are improving daily. They may finish studying about the time the machines finish improving, and neither one will have waited for the other.

I don’t know much about artificial intelligence. I’ve met plenty of natural stupidity and it never needed a summit. But it seems to me if a thing is as dangerous as they claim, the fella holding the leash oughtn’t be the one asking for a longer leash.

Still, I’ll say this for them: it was polite. Everybody smiled, everybody shook hands, everybody agreed the future is important. That’s more civility than you get at a cattle auction, and considerably less honesty.

They called it a summit on super intelligence. From where I sit, the super intelligence was well represented on both sides of the table. Whether it was artificial, I couldn’t say.