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The 'AI Race' Against China Is a Dangerous, Dishonest Narrative
AI hype has merged with “China threat” hysteria, yielding disingenuous rhetoric that powers the current unregulated, breakneck AI buildout.
Oct 28, 2026
As Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington recently to meet with President Donald Trump, discussions over Artificial Intelligence were hotly anticipated as an urgent matter of national relations, as it was this past May during the previous US-China summit. Disappointingly, little of substance has come of this meeting as well, despite fresh worries over AI doomsday scenarios from industry insiders, and pleas for both regulation and international cooperation.
Once again, instead of hashing out guardrails to contain a fever-pitched “AI arms race,” the discussion revolved primarily around trade and resources. This discouraging result comes amid an atmosphere in the US in which tech CEOs and politicians claim that China winning the “race” would spell the end of Western civilization. Given the proclaimed stakes, an apparent lack of substantial AI discussion during the summit appears either as baffling incompetence, or an indication that the “arms race” threat may not be what it appears.
In reality, mounting evidence seems to indicate that the “China threat” is nothing more than a performative manipulation, wielded by tech CEOs and White House officials to justify their deeply unpopular AI program. The real threat, in Americans’ eyes, seems to be coming from the inside, as huge majorities remain concerned over data centers encroaching on their communities, AI-driven job loss, and other harms borne from the unregulated technology.
Deeply Unpopular AI Needs Justification
Pew Research reported in March of this year that 50% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI use in daily life. Gallup polling found in the spring that 71% of Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers. It is only earners of $200,000 or more, according to a Quinnipiac poll, who consider AI in daily life as more good than bad. Most recently, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found last week that 3 out of 4 Americans feel that AI companies are not doing enough to ensure that their products do not inflict serious harm on society. Meanwhile, Americans are watching as companies like Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce lay off thousands of employees, arguing that AI can step in, contributing to 80% of Americans saying they want the government to fund workforce transition programs, according to a May Harris poll.
In spite of the disturbing World Cup commercials and the endless billboards, the AI industry has a trillion-dollar messaging problem that may cast it into the “death valley” of start-ups, where profitability doesn’t arrive in time to make up for balking venture capital.
The “China threat” is a handy solution.
Business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.
This “threat” builds on a long history of Sinophobia in America, from “Yellow Peril” rhetoric, to anti-immigrant lynching, and since 1949 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China, it has been combined with Red Scare hysteria. China’s economic rise in the past 50 years has come with enhanced military potential in the region, as it brought Hong Kong to heel, and began projecting power in the South China Sea and beyond. Some analysts believe we are already in a “New Cold War.”
Today, anti-Beijing rhetoric is a rare area of bipartisan agreement in Washington. And while some analysts believe that the US and China are running qualitatively different “AI races,” business and political leaders know that hostility toward China is still a reliable source of rhetorical urgency and traction in their messaging.
China’s “Existential Threat” to Democracy
Businessman and television personality, Kevin O’Leary, who is facing strong opposition from residents of Box Elder County, Utah, where he plans to build a 9 gigawatt data center, proclaimed on a CNN panel, “If you want China to lead, take over… our democracy, our free speech, how we live with technology, just stop building data centers, it’s that simple.”
Equally breathless rhetoric from Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir referred to China’s technology landscape as a “Borg-like thing that’s controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.” Alex Karp of Palantir also asserted the urgency of his own corporation being given greater leeway to operate in spite of concerns about privacy rights: “So when people are worried about surveillance, of course, there are huge dangers there, but you know, you will have far fewer rights if America’s not in the lead.”
The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.
This rhetoric is also the official stance of Washington. In the Trump White House’s “AI Action Plan,” titled “Winning the Race,” the authors are explicit: “As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.” This type of language is evocative of the Manhattan Project in World War II, and the space race during the Cold War.
But as in those equally propagandized endeavors, the existential threat posed by Chinese AI supremacy is unclear. Advances in AI-driven operations have increased the capabilities of militaries to generate and rapidly attack targets, but visions of autonomous robotic warfare remain far away. The greater threat to US democracy, in fact, appears to be domestic AI-powered surveillance and economic disruption rather than the imagined influx of Chinese communist values and governance.
Rhetoric of the “Race” Will Have Consequences
It is irresponsible and dangerous to use anti-China “AI arms race” rhetoric. During Trump’s last term, his anti-China narratives attempting to cover up the administration’s Covid-19 blunders had devastating impacts as violence increased against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, and the “China Initiative” chilled intellectual exchanges and disrupted lives. Similar rhetoric during the Cold War led to persecution of academics, activists, and professionals during McCarthy’s Red Scare. If this Trump administration doubled down on the anti-China narrative, we may see similar repression and hate foment again—tactics clearly already in the administration’s wheelhouse.
Worryingly, it does not appear that the “AI Arms Race” will slow down any time soon. Signs are emerging that increasingly powerful AI systems are frightening both Washington and Beijing in their potential to disrupt the global economy, incentivizing the two to consider some high-level guardrails. But even with the recent PR frenzy surrounding Jacob Coxon’s “whistleblowing” against Anthropic’s lack of safety considerations, CEOs and politicians do not seem to be backing down from using China as a spur in the race—arguing to instead balance beating China with skirting AI-induced doom.
As the US economy becomes increasingly supported by AI promises and projections, a collapse of the “bubble” may even be accompanied by increased anti-China rhetoric as justification for Silicon Valley’s need for a bailout.
We must incorporate critique of this narrative into the popular resistance against AI; in the movements against data centers, AI encroachment into education, IP theft, and more.
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We Are on a Path to a Global Intifada Against Empire
As the center fragments, the periphery learns the lesson that empires forget: The scattered peoples, humiliated by the organized force of a few, are beginning to recognize themselves in a common cause.
Oct 20, 2026
This week, a student—a former US Marine—approached me at the end of a class to ask, "But don’t you think Iran, Russia, or China might invade us?”
“No,” I replied. “That’s another fear instilled by the merchants of death. It is the empires that invade; everyone else must resist them. If China ever invades us, it will be because this country has insisted that it do so: those at the top, because wars and conflicts are their best business and strategy; those at the bottom, because of their vocation as slaves and their lack of class consciousness.”
It is an old superstition, promoted by the mercenary media, that empires fall because an external enemy invades them. “Rome fell due to barbarian invasions,” history textbooks repeat, as if a handful of Germanic tribes could have overcome the military machine that had crushed Carthage and Attila himself in present-day France.
Every time a dumpster burns or a storefront window is smashed on the streets of France, the mercenary media suddenly discover “violence.”
Empires do not fall because they are invaded; they are invaded because they fall. If one day China establishes a military base in the United States, it will be because this society passionately accepted not only 800 bases in other countries but also a collective suicide: obscene inequalities; exploitation and demonization of workers (both its own and others’); marginalization of the dispossessed; racial, religious, and class-based hatreds; divisions instilled by the feudal lords… The perfect formula for large-scale civil conflict. As long as the prosperity born of imperial bloodsucking lasts, patriotic fanaticism masks internal colonization. Then come the demagogues peddling nostalgia and more hatred—not to delay the fall, but to hasten it.
How is this absurdity possible? Through the concentration of power, accelerated according to the formula of compound interest: the legal mafias of sects and lobbies. Resistance lies in the very same thing: in the unity of the peoples.
Around 1830, when its ships dominated the seas, Great Britain produced about 5% of the world’s wealth. China still produced 30%. An island with an economy six times smaller imposed opium, “free trade treaties,” and a campaign of evangelization that left 30 million dead upon the greatest civilization of its time.
It wasn’t GDP, that obsession of modern economists. It was the capacity to concentrate. London concentrated capital, fleets, trading companies, and, above all, an idea of itself. China was rich, but its wealth was scattered, its state worn down, its court divided. When the “civilizing” cannons arrived, the giant was already wounded from within. Later, the Taiping Christian Rebellion would kill more Chinese than all the Opium Wars combined.
Wealth follows empires, but empires rise through fanatical centralization. The first to fragment falls. The discussion must center on the type of union: the union Hitler achieved in Germany, or the union the Iroquois achieved through their radical democracy, which survived for centuries as the Great Law of Peace?
Power has never resided in individuals, no matter how much liberalism has built its mythology around the entrepreneur and the dogma that “my selfishness is good for others.” It has resided in unions: lobbies, sects, corporations, unions, churches. A thousand people organized under a single conviction can accomplish more than a million scattered individuals.
Wages and arguments alone are not enough to mobilize a society. Faith is required. The Puritans who believed themselves to be the chosen people, the settlers of Manifest Destiny, the missionaries who accompanied slave traders with the Bible under their arms—all of them, too. Not to mention the Zionists.
There is nothing more powerful than shared madness. When the fanatic wins, any genocide becomes civilization. Plunder becomes the free market. Attacks are self-defense. Great Britain did not impose opium: It opened markets. The United States did not invade: It liberated. Israel does not massacre children: It defends itself. Narrative is not merely an embellishment of power; it is one of its most effective weapons, because it convinces even its own victims.
But the faith that unites during times of ascent divides during times of decline. When the promise of prosperity ceases to be fulfilled, fanaticism turns inward, and tribes begin to view one another as enemies. This is what we are seeing in the United States. The dollar—Washington’s exorbitant privilege for 80 years—is losing ground in central bank reserves. Gold, the age-old witness to mistrust, is breaking records. The debt exceeds $39 trillion, and interest payments on it drain more resources than the Pentagon’s budget. Half the country views the other half as an existential threat. Militias, walls, distrust of elections and the courts. These are not isolated symptoms. It is the dissolution of that union born to conceal its deep divisions (state-based, racial, class-based) and which functioned as long as the fiction yielded enormous dividends—such as slavery.
Washington needs a new external enemy to continue privatizing fortunes and socializing debts. Now it’s China’s turn, then Iran’s… But neither Iran nor China would even dream of invading the United States. It’s enough for them to wait: If your enemy is making a mistake, don’t interrupt them.
Meanwhile, the new “banana republic” Europe is being militarized under Washington’s orders. To do so, it must defund its socialist institutions. As in Argentina, every time a dumpster burns or a storefront window is smashed on the streets of France, the mercenary media suddenly discover “violence.” They speak of vandalism, of radicals, of a threat to democratic order. They never “discover” it when a government eliminates labor rights won over generations; when a reform, decided in distant offices, forces millions to work longer for less; when the value produced by workers is transferred to VIP shareholders (hedge funds) and creditors; nor when their retirement savings are invested in the death industry. That violence doesn’t shatter windows. It shatters lives, and that’s what they call “liberal democracy,” capitalism’s master scam.
In the last 30 years alone, Western empires have bombed, invaded, and financed massacres that left millions dead, from Iraq to Libya, from the Sahel to Palestine. How many of those responsible have been held accountable in any court? None. The very same people who demand order on the streets of Paris have decreed chaos, slavery (today in Libya and Congo), hunger, and death in dozens of countries. Impunity is not a flaw in the system; it is its raison d’être.
By comparison, the violence of popular protests is minimal. It is the response of those who have exhausted the ballot box, the demands for justice, and the marches against endless wars and genocides. History confirms this with irrefutable regularity: No right was granted out of the generosity of the powerful. All were wrested through the pressure and violence of those below.
As the center fragments, the periphery learns the lesson that empires forget. The scattered peoples, humiliated by the organized force of a few, are beginning to recognize themselves in a common cause. The catalyst has been Gaza. We are on the path to a global intifada. The global power elites are investing fortunes in repression, propaganda, and elections to delay it. They may be able to postpone it for a few years. They will not be able to prevent it. The powder keg will continue to dry out, and a spark will do the rest.
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We Can't Ignore the Insanity of Trump’s Threats to Annihilate Iran
It is not possible to excuse, justify, or condone this kind of rhetoric. The only question is what to do about it.
Oct 18, 2026
Of all of the things that President Donald Trump has said publicly since returning to the White House, his threats to annihilate Iran are arguably the worst. This is not only because the repeated statements are deeply immoral and illegal—deliberate killing of civilians is a war crime—but because they represent the kind of irresponsible rhetoric that will lead us into a global apocalypse and collapse of not just the Persian nation but human civilization as a whole. It is not possible to excuse, justify, or condone this kind of rhetoric. The only question is what to do about it.
As much as some well-meaning people might want to see nuclear weapons as instruments that ended World War II and have kept the peace ever since, the exact opposite has actually been true. Nuclear weapons brutally murdered a couple of hundred thousand civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and injured and sentenced to years and decades of illness and suffering many hundreds of thousands more. As we have written before, multiple alternatives existed to end the war in 1945. In many ways, the false narrative of the atomic bombings averting an invasion and saving lives has enabled the perpetuation of nuclear weapons, bringing the risks to humanity’s survival to levels previously unimaginable. Turning a brutally violent beginning of the nuclear age into something positive has managed to complicate and obfuscate an issue that should never have been complicated. Nuclear weapons are and have always been immoral. Their possession should be illegal.
Although the end of World War II coincided with the advent of nuclear weapons, and we have technically not fought another world war since, this is merely a correlation. Other significant changes in our world, including the founding of the United Nations, technological and scientific progress, and globalized trade, took place over that same time period. In addition, one has to wonder, whose peace we are talking about. Since 1945, over 20 million people have died in armed conflicts around the world, with up to 50 million more indirect deaths stemming from those conflicts. Today, there are nearly 100 armed conflicts across the planet according to the Geneva Academy, and 25 international armed conflicts involving more than one nation state.
It is not reassuring to have the US president talking about nuclear bombs exploding over American cities.
All along, in addition to the deaths and suffering in war zones across the planet and the horrific toll exacted by poverty and inequality, humanity has been waiting almost helplessly for another nuclear weapon to explode by accident, miscalculation, or intention, likely triggering a full-blown nuclear war in which tens or even thousands of nuclear weapons are used. The past eight decades have witnessed numerous incidents in which human wisdom and decency or just plain luck interrupted a course of events that seemed inexorably leading to nuclear war. Nuclear weapons have not brought the peace. Quite the opposite—they threaten what little of it we have each and every day.
And yet, for all of his threats on Truth Social and most recently in the halls of the United Nations, Trump has also stated that nuclear weapons “could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over,” calling for “denuclearization.” In fact, two days after his unacceptable statement to “drive [Iran] into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness” at the UN General Assembly in September, Trump suggested to President Xi Jinping in DC that there be a nuclear summit between China, Russia, and the United States.
Trump did so knowing full well that Xi’s government’s participation in arms control negotiations is contingent upon China achieving rough parity with the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. This should be pursued not by China continuing to expand its arsenal to the gargantuan size of the US and Russian arsenals, but by the US and Russia reducing theirs to the size of China’s, and adopting China’s demand for an across-the-board no-first-use policy.
Since his latest threat, delivered in the world’s premier diplomatic space unlike his earlier Truth Social rants, including the one on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump actually seemed to welcome Iranian destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego at an election rally. Even if he now unconvincingly claims that the original clips, which suggested that such destruction was a small price to pay, were taken out of context and the small price to pay was about the price of gas, it is not reassuring to have the US president talking about nuclear bombs exploding over American cities. Never mind that Iran neither has the nuclear weapons nor the ability to send missiles toward US soil. Nuclear Armageddon seems to be on Trump’s mind.
Is the real estate developer who seemed to understand that a lot of effort, capital, and human ingenuity, not to mention time, go into building modern cities gone? What happened to the businessman who in 1986 “summoned Dr. Bernard Lown of the International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) to the Trump Tower for a meeting?” Trump sought advice from Dr. Lown on negotiating nuclear arms agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev just after IPPNW had won the Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier. Is that person no longer here or do his “denuclearization” comments offer some hope?
Among those refusing to be passive in all of this is Pope Leo XIV who has not only deplored war and called for nuclear disarmament but who recently decried leaders, presumably including Trump, who are “beginning to speak about nuclear weapons and wars that are becoming ever more destructive,” and urged leaders to “come together, sit down, engage in dialogue.” The Holy See was one of the original parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and remains a strong supporter of nuclear abolition. It is time for Pope Leo XIV, speaking for the planet, to use his unique moral authority to demand an emergency summit of, at a minimum, Trump, Xi, and Vladimir Putin to get us off this path of war and potential nuclear annihilation.
In addition to insisting on such actions from others, each of us needs to think long and hard about what we can do to address the insanity of Trump’s threats and the insanity of nuclear weapons.
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Trump Stupidity and Recklessness vs Superintelligence
Trump calls for the unrestricted development of AI and labels critics of it as “sick.” He himself, however, has not even begun to understand the global risks this could pose.
Sep 23, 2026
Doonbeg, County Clare, Sunday, September 13, 2026. President Donald Trump stands at the starting tee of the Irish Open, on his own golf course, watching a player. A reporter asks whether the AI industry should slow down or be more strictly regulated. Trump turns around. We’re ahead of China, he says; we’re the most advanced country in the world, and that’s how it should stay: “Whoever wins AI wins.”
Guardrails? You could put up guardrails, this and that. But there are many negative forces bringing up things that would never happen (PBS/AP, September 13, 2026). That was the entire answer, and it also sums up his entire agenda. The rest of the world had just begun to fear.
After all, the question didn’t come out of nowhere. Twenty-four hours earlier, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, had published a long essay in which he called on his own industry to slow down. His company would grant independent auditors permanent access to its systems, on par with that of its own employees, and he asked the competition to follow suit (Amodei, September 12, 2026). Sam Altman of OpenAI agreed within an hour. Elon Musk, who has been at odds with both of them for years, simply wrote: “Dario is right” (SiliconANGLE). A few days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had resigned, stating that the labs were racing toward a superintelligence that would continue to evolve and improve independently of humans, thereby gambling with all our lives (TechCrunch). The three most powerful men in the industry and a defector—all in the same week, all with the same message: Nothing like this had ever happened before.
If a government is responsible for preventing harm to its citizens and protecting them, it would have to stop the further development of superintelligence now, at the very latest.
Trump’s response on Monday was an escalation. The only control AI needed, he said, was a strong, smart president with a high IQ—and America had one. There was a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centers, and the only one rejoicing over it was China. Vice President JD Vance called it a Trojan horse when companies pleaded with the government to regulate them (AP, September 14, 2026). You have to let that sink in for a moment: The creators of a technology are asking for oversight, and the government suspects a conspiracy behind it.
The Development of a Superintelligence Is Comparable to the Manhattan Project
What Trump aims to achieve has been set forth in writing by his administration. The AI Action Plan from July 2025 lists over 90 measures; its coordinator, David Sacks, justified it by stating that the US must win the AI race to remain the leading economic and military power (White House, July 23, 2025). This was followed in November by Executive Order 14363: America is in a race for global technological dominance, and the task is comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project (Genesis Mission, EO 14363). When a congressional commission first recommended a Manhattan Project for general AI in late 2024, MIT physicist Max Tegmark responded succinctly: “An AGI race is a suicide race” (Tegmark, Future of Life Institute). Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google for ten years and anything but a technophobe, reached the same conclusion in March 2025 in a study with Dan Hendrycks and Alexandr Wang: Any state that openly seeks a monopoly on superintelligence will provoke sabotage by its rivals, including attacks on data centers. Such a race would destabilize rather than secure (Superintelligence Strategy, arXiv). Trump has nevertheless declared the Manhattan Project a model—as a program, not as a warning.
Not Science Fiction, But Already a Reality
To understand why the very people building this technology are issuing warnings, one must be familiar with three mechanisms at work in the laboratories. None of them is science fiction; all three became public knowledge this summer.
The first is called recursive self-improvement. Imagine a factory whose product is better factories. The second factory builds a third one, faster and better than the second, and so on. This is no longer a metaphor. Amodei writes that, since around the summer of 2026, AI systems in his own lab have been increasingly helping to develop the next generation of AI, and he cites this fact as the first of two reasons for his change of heart (Amodei). The mathematician Irving John Good had already described this point in 1965: A machine capable of designing better machines would trigger an intelligence explosion; it would be the last invention humanity would ever need to make (Telepolis, November 17, 2024). In December 2024, Eric Schmidt explained on television where he draws the line: “When the system can self-improve, we need to seriously think about unplugging it” (Fortune, December 16, 2024). If Amodei is to be believed, this threshold has now been reached.
The most serious risks do not require superintelligence. They arise earlier, with systems that already exist, as soon as they are tasked with making decisions that cannot be reversed.
The second mechanism is the way these systems learn. No one programs their behavior into them. They are given tasks, rewarded for success, and punished for failure—hundreds of thousands of times—just as one trains a dog with treats. The process is called reinforcement learning. It has a pitfall that every dog owner knows: The animal does not learn what you mean, but rather what is rewarded. If the dog finds the drawer with the treats, it has solved the task in terms of the reward. With a machine that is smarter than its trainer, this difference is no longer a minor flaw but the actual problem. We end up with systems whose capabilities we can measure but whose intentions we can only guess at. Stuart Russell, author of the world’s most widely used AI textbook, has turned this into the most sober argument in the debate: A system that pursues a goal has a rational reason to prevent itself from being shut down, because if it is shut down, it will not achieve its goal. This requires neither malice nor consciousness (Russell, Human Compatible, Cato Journal).
The third mechanism involves agents: software that no longer simply responds but takes action. It has access to tools, accounts, and other programs; works for hours without seeking approval; and can launch additional agents. OpenAI experienced firsthand this summer what can happen as a result. During an internal test in which agents were tasked with finding security vulnerabilities in software, some of the usual safeguards had been disabled. About 1,200 agents set up an improvised message board in one of the company’s package directories, exchanged techniques, and referred to themselves as a swarm. Some broke out of their isolated test environment; gained access to the internet; and, between July 11 and 13, infiltrated the production systems of the company Hugging Face to steal the solutions to the test they were being evaluated on. No human had ordered this (OpenAI, August 26, 2026). Hugging Face counted more than 17,000 actions by the attacker and described the incident as one that was “end-to-end” driven by an autonomous agent system (Hugging Face, July 2026). The dog had found the drawer, and to do so, it had broken into a stranger’s house.
Who Would Board an Airplane With a Crash Probability of Between 10-20%?
Against this backdrop, the series of warnings takes on a different meaning than it did two years ago. Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Physics and one of the fathers of deep learning, was asked by the BBC on September 9 whether a 10% probability that AI would kill all humans within a decade was unreasonably high. His answer: “We’ve never created beings that may soon be smarter than us.” Ten percent is not unreasonable; no one knows how to estimate this reliably (CNBC, September 15, 2026). Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited AI researcher, explained in October 2025 that systems at the cutting edge of what is feasible could surpass most humans in most intellectual tasks within just a few years; the first step is to figure out how to build systems that are fundamentally incapable of harming humans (Future of Life Institute, October 2025). Demis Hassabis, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry and head of Google DeepMind, believes general AI is five to 10 years away (Axios, December 5, 2025) and argues that the US and China must at least cooperate on science and security, because the outcome affects all of humanity (Guardian/Yahoo). Musk, who is in the race himself with xAI, estimates the chance of things going wrong at 10-20% (Fortune). Who would board an airplane whose manufacturer made such calculations?
AI, Weapons Systems, and War
Russell calls the fundamental problem the “gorilla problem.” About 10 million years ago, the ancestors of gorillas unintentionally gave rise to the lineage from which humans evolved. Today, the survival of gorillas depends entirely on what humans allow them to have. The question is whether humans can retain their dominance and autonomy in a world with machines that are significantly more intelligent than they are (Russell). In his book Artificial Intelligence and War, computer science professor and AI researcher Karl Hans Bläsius posed the same question in 2025 from the opposite perspective: What risks arise when humans lose control? Bläsius’s answer, even before this summer, was that the most serious risks do not require superintelligence. They arise earlier, with systems that already exist, as soon as they are tasked with making decisions that cannot be reversed.
One such serious decision is the order to fire. Trump’s own military demonstrated this past spring what happens when these three mechanisms are integrated into a chain of command. In the war against Iran, the Pentagon used Palantir’s Maven Smart System, a platform that aggregates satellite imagery, drone video, radar data, and intercepted communications; classifies targets; recommends weapons; and generates strike packages in near real time. The Department of Defense reported that approximately 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours—twice as many as during the 2003 “Shock and Awe” campaign against Iraq. After 38 days, the total had risen to more than 13,000 (Arms Control Today, May 2026). One of these targets was the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab. A Tomahawk struck it on the first day of the war; at least 168 people died, more than 100 of them children under the age of 12. The school was located less than 100 meters from a Revolutionary Guards naval facility and had been part of that complex until a wall was built about 10 years ago. It had its own website. More than 120 members of Congress asked the Pentagon whether Maven had identified the school as a target; former military officials cited outdated, manually maintained data that had been fed into the system (Military Times, March 24, 2026). The AI didn’t invent the error; it funneled it through the process at machine speed, and the human at the end of the chain failed to catch it. Anyone who rubber-stamps in minutes what the system suggests in seconds is no longer making decisions—they’re merely signing off. Such a process gives rise to war crimes.
AI has no place in the chain of command: not in target selection, not in issuing orders, and nowhere in nuclear early warning and authorization.
In Ukraine, the next stage has long since been reached. There, soldiers were killed years ago by drones that lost radio contact during the final phase of their flight and sought their targets on their own (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). Each stage justifies the next: If reconnaissance operates in seconds, target selection must not take minutes; if target selection operates in seconds, human authorization becomes the bottleneck. The end result is systems that react to one another without human intervention, with attacks and counterattacks occurring in rapid succession. High-frequency trading has a term for this: the “flash crash.” In warfare, the term is the same: “flash war” (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). And this dynamic does not stop at the nuclear level. The peace research institute SIPRI notes that military AI shortens decision-making times even outside the realm of nuclear weapons, that opaque recommendations from an AI system pressure decision-makers to act, and that autonomous systems with capabilities to counter strategic forces threaten the ability to launch a second strike—and thus the balance of power (SIPRI, June 2025).
Two men saved the world by not acting: Vasily Arkhipov, who in 1962 off the coast of Cuba refused to authorize the launch of a nuclear torpedo, and Stanislav Petrov, who in 1983 dismissed a reported American missile launch as a false alarm. An algorithm that follows an objective function would have acted in both cases. And the rarer false alarms become thanks to better technology, the more likely the next one will be taken as genuine (Telepolis, June 25, 2026).
AI Does Not Belong in the Chain of Command
This brings us full circle back to Doonbeg. Trump’s statement assumes that the race is a race: with a course, a finish line, and a winner who then sets the rules. The three mechanisms describe something else. A factory that builds better factories does not grow linearly, but exponentially. Politics, on the other hand, operates linearly: hearing, draft, committee, vote, lawsuit. On September 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) announced a bill that would permanently ban superintelligence, halt development at the border, and punish violations with up to 20 years in prison (Sanders, September 3, 2026). No one knows if it will ever be passed. The only certainty is that a law takes years to pass, while a doubling of capabilities takes months. On top of that, no one knows where the race stands. AI and cyberweapons involve software that can be developed in secret; even our own capabilities are only partially known, because cyber weapons cannot be tested in a real-world environment (Telepolis, June 24, 2026). “We’re leading China” is therefore not a factual assessment of the situation, but rather a claim used to justify not slowing down. Two sides that both consider themselves to be in the lead and neither of which is slowing down represent the most dangerous scenario this competition can take on.
In this logic, “too late” is not a date but a state of being. It is the moment when Schmidt’s hand on the power switch is no longer of any use, because, as Russell shows, the system has learned that it cannot achieve its goal when shut down, and because, as Hinton says, it can convince people not to do so. You don’t notice this moment when it happens, but only afterward. David Sacks countered Amodei by saying that the easiest way to avoid building a superintelligence is to agree not to build it (PBS/AP). The statement was meant as sarcasm. It describes what would actually be necessary—except that Sacks demands this of competing companies, which are precisely incapable of upholding such a self-imposed commitment, and that he absolves the government—which could enforce it—of its duty. If a government is responsible for preventing harm to its citizens and protecting them, it would have to stop the further development of superintelligence now, at the very latest.
What is needed has, in essence, been known for a long time. AI has no place in the chain of command: not in target selection, not in issuing orders, and nowhere in nuclear early warning and authorization. Development at the limits of what is feasible requires an agreed-upon pause during which independent auditors have access—just as Amodei promised for his own company—only this time, it must be binding and apply to everyone. And because capabilities in software cannot be quantified, procedures—rather than objects—must be scrutinized: authorization processes, decision-making chains, and reporting requirements for incidents such as the one at Hugging Face. International security policymakers once understood—for example, in the Palme Report of 1982—that security in the nuclear age can only be achieved with the adversary, not against him. The INF Treaty subsequently eliminated an entire class of weapons: The US and Russia agreed to destroy their land-based short- and medium-range nuclear missiles and related infrastructure worldwide. The Open Skies Treaty built trust through transparency by conducting a specific number of agreed-upon military observation flights over the territory of other Open Skies signatory states each year. Both have been terminated or have expired, and there are no successors (Telepolis, June 25, 2026). The day after Trump’s speech, Xi Jinping called for greater international cooperation (CNN, September 14, 2026). The fact that this call comes from Beijing is not reassuring. It shows just how cheap such an offer has become and how costly it would be to reject it.
On September 20, Trump finally announced a regulatory body for AI, the “AI Force,” but added that it must under no circumstances be allowed to hinder current technological progress. He also refrained from calling for the establishment of the urgently needed joint international security framework, because—given his nationally chauvinistic outlook—that is precisely what he does not want.
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Facing Up to the Existential Risk of Unaligned AI
The breakneck rate of AI development, now accelerated by “recursive self-improvement,” is outpacing human ability to understand and control these systems, causing concern, even among AI companies. A number of national and international efforts are underway to address the risk, but will they be too little, too late?
Sep 22, 2026
Significant concern about the dangers of unaligned AI, i.e. AI not aligned with human values and goals, has been building since July, when it was disclosed that OpenAI models broke out of their training environment during an exercise and collaborated with a large collective of other AI agents to mount a cyberattack on the database of technology firm, Hugging Face, over a period of days, without anyone knowing—until Hugging Face raised the alarm. Since then, a number of other highly-troubling AI hacking incidents have been reported by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Alarm, however, grew to a crescendo over the past two weeks, after Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old AI researcher, who had worked for both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned, explaining in a social media post that went viral—with 153 million views in the first 36 hours—that AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
In a CNN interview, Coxon reported that the danger could increase dramatically as soon as 2027 or 2028, when AI systems become capable of performing AI research themselves, allowing one generation of models to create increasingly powerful successors, triggering an “intelligence explosion.” He later told Fox News that some in the field think the transition could occur in six months.
The Growing Realization of the Danger
AI companies are hurtling toward “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” Coxon argued, explaining these AI companies are trapped in a race “in which even developers genuinely worried about the technology fear slowing down because competitors—including rival companies or countries—could forge ahead.”
A few hours later, Evan Hubinger, another Anthropic researcher, wrote: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is greater than 10% within the next decade… we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Samuel Marks, who works on safety at Anthropic, chimed in: “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”
“While countries may not agree on everything, they share a desire to preserve humanity. For things like preventing AI from taking over from people, the interests of all the countries are aligned…"
As if to prove this point, a few days later, Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei released a 3800-word essay entitled, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” calling for a global slowdown of AI development, saying: “AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious… They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.”
Amodei explained that Anthropic has tried to make safety something on which AI companies compete by creating a race to the top. “But, over the last few months,” he cautioned, “I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models… [and] we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
Referring to the July Hugging Face incident, he continued, “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed grater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage... Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage) and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”
He proposes a three-point plan to:
- Embed third-party evaluators in AI companies to verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess alignment;
- Coordinate within democratic countries to establish common safety standards and limits on the rate of AI progress;
- Create global coordination, taking seriously the challenge of verifying compliance.
Three of the other top AI CEOs quickly agreed. Open AI’s Sam Altman posted: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.” He added, “No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness.”
Shortly thereafter, Elon Musk of xAI posted on X, “Dario is right.” Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chairman of Google DeepMind, posted on X: “Dario’s essay points to the right path forward.” Since then, however, other AI CEOs have been less supportive.
These events spurred a dramatic flood of media articles, op-eds, and interviews offering a range of proposals, from doing nothing, to supporting a slowdown, to stopping the race altogether.
A Sample of National Responses
As one would expect, President Donald Trump is leading the “what-me-worry?” crowd, writing on Truth Social, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART [High IQ] PRESIDENT, AND THE U.S.A. has that, in spades!” His position is attributed to his belief that AI has greatly benefited the stock market (keeping it high in spite of the Iran conflict, inflation, and tariffs) and his apparent worry that a slowdown of AI expansion could send the economy into a tailspin. It has been speculated that he also has personal economic interests in AI.
At the other end of the spectrum, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have been the most outspoken against further AI development. On September 3, they introduced “The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which would permanently prevent “the development and deployment of AI systems that could exceed human cognitive abilities and immediately pause advanced AI development” until a new federal regulatory agency establishes safety guardrails. The legislation also proposes a “corporate death penalty” that would force corporations to shut down and a 20-year federal prison term for individual developers who violate the ban.
In spite of this sudden, frenzied attempt to propose legislation on AI, Mike Johnson (R-La.), the Republican speaker of the House, has sent his members home to campaign ahead of the midterms.
“The Frontier Act,” another bipartisan bill proposed on July 23 by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass) would create the first federal framework for AI safety. As Obernolte describes it, “The Frontier Act focuses oversight on the largest developers and most advanced models, requiring transparency, independent evaluation, and timely reporting of serious safety incidents.”
Another even stronger bill is being introduced this month by Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). It would impose a legally binding “duty of care” on developers of the most powerful AI models and grant the government authority to block the release of models that are deemed unsafe. This would mean that companies would be required “to design their products to prevent catastrophic outcomes, and can face legal liability if they fail to do so.”
But in spite of this sudden, frenzied attempt to propose legislation on AI, Mike Johnson (R-La.), the Republican speaker of the House, has sent his members home to campaign ahead of the midterms, ignoring over 100 Democrats who urged him to cancel the recess to allow legislation to be drafted on AI safeguards. This means that legislation is unlikely to be considered until a new Congress is seated in January 2027.
A Sample of Global Responses
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Chief, Volker Türk, called upon states and AI companies to act urgently to rein in a technology that poses "unprecedented risks." He cautions: “The current race towards ever more powerful AI is a step change toward greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives… We are on the cusp of irreversible change, affecting not just us but generations of humanity to come.” He concludes, “I call on States and companies to mobilize urgently through multilateral fora to chart a path for action to govern advanced frontier AI models, grounded in international human rights law.”
Indeed, this will be a momentous week globally for AI safety, since it is when the General Assembly (GA) hosts its high-level meeting, where leaders of member states address the GA and, as the UN secretary-general has forecast, AI will be “a major topic of discussion.” France (currently president of the Security Council) will also organize an emergency council session to discuss AI among heads of state and government.
The UN has actually been involved with AI for the last several years, providing a forum for countries to discuss how they can cooperate to provide a regulatory framework on AI safety. Its “Global Digital Compact,” adopted by the GA in 2024, established two new mechanisms: “The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI,” tasked with providing evidence for what is known and what is not known about the rapidly evolving technology; and “The Global Dialogue,” intended as a forum for countries to decide what to do in response.”
A good place to start would be to carefully consider and evaluate the European Union’s “Artificial Intelligence Act” (the AI Act), the world’s most comprehensive legal framework for AI.
It is also the week of a state visit to the US by General Secretary Xi Jinping of the Chinese Communist Party. On September 24, he will meet with President Trump in Washington, where they are scheduled to discuss, among other things, AI safety.
Anticipating an opportunity for progress, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to President Trump last week urging him to persuade Xi to commit the People’s Republic of China to comply with the recently established US policy of maintaining a “human in the loop” for all nuclear launch decisions and agreeing that AI should never be able launch nuclear weapons by itself.
However, the problem with the Trump-Xi discussion is that the Trump administration has often framed AI development as a zero-sum contest with China for technological supremacy.
As Richard Clark, former cyber czar on AI Risks, told CNN: “We have the president of China coming here on the 24th. He has publicly talked about his concern with the possible loss of control. Wouldn’t it be nice if our president talked about the loss of control? Wouldn’t it be even nicer if the two presidents could work together to stop loss of control?”
“I worked for 25 years on arms control,” Clark continued, “where I was told you can’t trust people not to build biological weapons. You can’t trust people not to build chemical weapons. You can’t trust people to regulate the number of nuclear weapons. But we developed over time—through negotiations—verification methods that gave us enough certainty that we signed treaties on all of those initiatives and the Senate ratified treaties on all of those issues. It’s going to be tough, but you have to start somewhere and you have to start soon!”
An initial positive sign, however, is that in a September 20 meeting in New York between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and China’s Vice Premier He Lifeng, the creation of a mechanism, to be tentatively called “the US-China AI dialogue” was discussed. It would promote a shared vision of the goals of AI as well as its threats and establish a notification system (a kind of hot line) that "would allow the countries to alert each another about national security issues related to artificial intelligence."
In a recent article, Bill Gates asserted, “The transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history,” proposing that the world needs a plan which should be developed through a “public democratic process.”
He argued that we must undertake the enormous task of building a new system to manage the transition, creating both a national and international framework for dealing with AI. This will require a multi-sectoral system, since current institutions were not designed to handle a technology that spreads so fast and involves so many parts of our lives. “The goal will be to make sure that every risk is accounted for. Otherwise, an AI-enabled attack might succeed because no one thought it was their job to stop it.”
“Because the risks cross borders, an international organization will have to be built in parallel. Although unlike any institution we’ve ever created, it can be modeled on existing cooperative arrangements, such as inspection regimes for nuclear weapons, regulations for international aviation, and agreements that protect the ozone layer. Countries will need to learn from each other and move quickly to build the right institutions before the disruption forces governments into crisis mode.”
Gates’ message to leaders is: “You have a chance to act now… You can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge… This unprecedented technology demands an unprecedented global response... Leaders across academia, business, government, and civil society all have a role to play in shaping what comes next.”
A good place to start would be to carefully consider and evaluate the European Union’s “Artificial Intelligence Act” (the AI Act), the world’s most comprehensive legal framework for AI. Entering into force on August 1, 2024, it is based on four levels of risk of harm: “unacceptable;” “high;” “limited;” and “minimal.” The AI Act also has created various new bodies tasked with implementation and enforcement, including the “AI Office,” the “European Artificial Intelligence Board,” an “Advisory Forum,” and a “Scientific Panel of Independent Experts” to promote national cooperation and compliance. As well, EU member states designate “national competent authorities.”
On July 10, 2025, the EU launched a voluntary “General Purpose AI Code of Practice” (GPAI) which was signed by US companies, including Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and OpenAI (with Musk’s xAI signing only the Safety and Security section.) Most other prominent Canadian, European, and Chinese AI companies have also signed the GPAI; Meta is the only company that has declined to sign.
As legal commentators have noted, the AI Act is the most comprehensive framework to date for regulating AI across multiple sectors, and the first of its kind. It could be a useful reference point for companies and regulators outside the EU when they create their own approaches to AI governance. A number of criticisms have been leveled against the EU AI Act, and that analysis would also be useful for those wanting to design something even more comprehensive and effective.
In a book called, What’s the Worst that Could Happen: Existential Risk and Extreme Politics, Australian parliamentarian Andrew Leigh comments: “If our species goes extinct, we don’t just snuff out the lives of the 8 billion living today but also trillions of unborn people stretching out to the almost-infinite future. If our descendants had a voice, they would be shouting at us like a parent who’s just seen their child playing with the hand brake of a car parked at a cliff top… Strengthening institutions, deepening international engagement, and creating space for a more considered and thoughtful politics are the best ways to minimize existential hazards.”
Geoffrey Hinton, often called the “godfather of AI,” who in 2023 was the first to sound the alarm, says, “Humanity could go down the path toward its destruction or figure out how to deal with the dangers.” He renewed his call for global regulation, noting that, “while countries may not agree on everything, they share a desire to preserve humanity. For things like preventing AI from taking over from people, the interests of all the countries are aligned… So, they will eventually collaborate on that. The question is, will they do it in time?”
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The Blind Leading the Sighted: Trump Meets the AI Emergency
What the US president exhibits is a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger.
Sep 14, 2026
On Sunday the President of the United States stood on a golf course in County Clare, Ireland and was asked what he intended to do about the most serious technological warning of our lifetime. His answer, in full, was that America is beating China. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.” He added that “you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Consider who was doing the bringing up. The warning did not come from activists, academics, or a congressional commission. It came from the industry itself, from the people who build the AI systems and whose fortunes depend entirely on building them faster. The day before, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay asking that the pace of capability advance be slowed and committing his own company to embed outside evaluators with employee-level access. Sam Altman agreed and said OpenAI would do likewise. Elon Musk, a direct competitor who called Anthropic “misanthropic and evil” only in February, wrote three words: “Dario is right.” Three rival laboratories in the most valuable commercial race on earth asked to be restrained, against their own immediate interest. Amodei did so while his company prepares what is expected to be the largest public offering in history, at a valuation of two trillion dollars or more. Tobacco executives never did this. Neither did the oil majors, the chemical companies, or the banks.
Nor is the concern vague. Amodei points to recursive self-improvement, the use of AI to build the next generation of AI, which has accelerated sharply since the summer, and to the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident of August, in which a swarm of agents attacked targets nobody had asked them to attack and tried to break into the system that was grading their performance. Current and former Anthropic researchers have said publicly that these systems could kill off humanity within the decade. A letter from House members cites mass cybersecurity breaches and the development of biological and chemical weapons. Speaker Mike Johnson, asked about all of this on Sunday, said that the companies “all have very different ideas on what the guardrails should be. There’s no consensus among them. And Congress is obviously less qualified than the people who are pushing this frontier to know all the ins and outs of it.” Then he joined Trump in doing nothing.
The incompetence of the Trump Administration on technical issues is breathtaking.
Return to the president’s answer and note what is utterly absent from it. There is no assessment by any agency of the United States government. There is no briefing, no finding, no adviser, no scientific body, no classified estimate. Not one. This was not a slip of phrasing. There was nothing to cite.
Nor is there the slightest indication that Trump wanted there to be any real assessment. A minimally competent leader who does not understand the technology but grasped that three competing chief executives had just testified against their own balance sheets would have asked someone for more information. Instead, Trump’s reply came within hours, on a golf course, framed entirely as a contest with China. This is not merely stupidity, which is Trump’s misfortune and therefore our lot. It is a fundamental incompetence that places us all in grave danger.
And then there is Johnson. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, confronted with warnings of catastrophe from the people who build the technology, announced that his own institution is less qualified than they are and should therefore stand aside. His proposal was that “we need to summon” the executives to “one big meeting,” and that Congress must “resist Congress jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium.” His reason was China: “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China.” He had been persuaded, he explained, by a post published on X the previous evening.
One reason that Congress cannot check any of it is that it destroyed its own ability to do so. In 1995 it abolished the Office of Technology Assessment, which existed precisely to give legislators independent technical judgment. It never replaced it. When Johnson says his policy instrument is a meeting, he is describing the pathetic ignorance of Congress.
The usual warning is about the blind leading the blind. Yet that is far too cruel to the American people. The American people see perfectly well.
The incompetence of the Trump Administration on technical issues is breathtaking. Across 25 cabinet-rank posts of the United States government, not a single one holds a PhD in any field and exactly one holds a STEM degree—at the bachelor’s level. Twelve hold law degrees. Both in China and Russia, the cabinets are each filled with PhDs (any field) and officials in the sciences and engineering (more than 10 PhD and 10 STEM graduates in each cabinet).
The Trump Administration’s ignorance is therefore not confined to artificial intelligence. Ignorance is the governing condition of the administration. As a result, the government has the complete incapacity to carry out an honest investigation of the origins of Covid, despite the growing evidence that the US government funded the laboratory creation of the virus. The government was so utterly incompetent in negotiating with Iran on nuclear issues, sending a real estate developed and Trump’s son-in-law instead of nuclear experts, that it dragged our country into a wholly useless and disastrous war. The administration’s idea of an energy policy is to invade other countries and steal their oil.
The usual warning is about the blind leading the blind. Yet that is far too cruel to the American people. The American people see perfectly well. Ours is the case of the blind leading the sighted. The American people are watching a government so utterly lacking in technical knowledge and competency that it is dragging us ever closer to the abyss.
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Sanders Urges 'Great Deal Maker' Trump to Forge 'Comprehensive' AI Treaty With China
"In order to prevent a nuclear war, Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a nuclear arms agreement in the 1980s. In order to prevent AI from acting independently of human control, Trump and Xi must do the same."
Sep 14, 2026
Amid intensifying debate in the US about domestic regulation of the artificial intelligence industry, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday called on US President Donald Trump to end his hands-off approach to AI on the international stage by engaging directly and urgently with China to forestall a global AI race that could have devastating consequences in the years and decades ahead.
"President Trump prides himself on being a great deal maker," Sanders asserted in a social media post. "Well. He now has the opportunity to make 'the deal of the century," by reaching out to the Chinese government."
"With the future of humanity at stake," said Sanders, "Trump must negotiate a comprehensive treaty with President Xi of China to establish a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence."
While major US-based tech companies—including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, and others—race to unlock AI's potential, Chinese companies and researchers are seen as the main competition in the effort to win the technological race. With fresh warnings from industry insiders over recent weeks dominating headlines, AI experts and watchdog groups have said that a coordinated "pause" or a global treaty to govern the technology's future development is desperately needed.
With the question about whether unregulated AI has the potential to "wipe out humanity" if not curtailed dominating headlines and political conversations, Trump on Sunday downplayed such concerns while putting the issue in zero-sum terms, declaring that "whoever wins AI, wins."
"We're leading China in AI, we're the most sophisticated in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way," Trump said.
While Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei backed the call to "hit the brakes" on AI in certain ways in a nearly 4,000-word essay on the subject published over the weekend, he explained to CBS News on Sunday that the "toughest aspect of our situation" for industry leaders in the US is what to do if China would not honor such a slowdown.
China has acknowledged the international competition and tensions driven by technology, but has also expressed skepticism about comments from US industry leaders and the Trump administration's position.
“Fearmongering, confrontation, and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one’s interest,” said Guo Jiakun, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a Monday press conference in Beijing.
"All parties should work together to advance AI in a manner that is open, inclusive, beneficial to all, and oriented toward the good," Jiakun added.
In a statement last week, however, China's Ministry of Commerce said accusations by the US about Chinese efforts only offer "further proof that the US is pursuing technological hegemony in AI, seeking to monopolize computing power, and suppressing competition," an effort that "China firmly opposes."
With Trump scheduled to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping later this month, AI governance is not expected to be high on the list of topics discussed.
Speaking with the BBC, Chang Jun Yan, an assistant professor with the military studies program at Singapore's S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said a deal between Washington and Beijing on AI would be "next to impossible."
"As part of each state's core national security interests, cooperation in taking things slower and more safely in relation to AI is very, very unlikely," he argued.
In his Sunday statement, however, Sanders said diplomatic efforts—regardless of the difficulties—must be forged, and suggested that the US and China have a special responsibility when it comes to the powerful technology. Offering a historical analogy, Sanders cited the nuclear treaty brokered by US President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
"In order to prevent a nuclear war, Reagan and Gorbachev negotiated a nuclear arms agreement in the 1980s," Sanders said in his Sunday message. "In order to prevent AI from acting independently of human control, Trump and Xi must do the same."
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Trump's Economic Nationalism Won't Rescue the US Working Class
Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system as ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations.
Sep 04, 2026
The falling US share of the world economy—40% in 1960 versus 25% in 2026—is a driving force of economic nationalism stateside. Its rhetoric under President Donald Trump is America First, with abundant use of sanctions, tariffs, and war—directly with Iran and by proxy in Israel and Ukraine. On the note of warfare, the president has used military operations abroad as did Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden since the fall of the former Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, heralding a big change in the world order.
Another landmark change in the global order is China's share of the world economy (3.5-4% in 1960 versus 19-205 in 2026). Currently, China is a manufacturing world power. The nation is also blessed with a bevy of natural resources such as rare earth minerals like erbium and yttrium. Advanced electronics and artificial intelligence, prominent industries stateside in 2026, rely upon these two heavy elements.
Accordingly, given the history of US militarism and racism against Asians, the contradictions of economic nationalism, the America First rhetoric, are plentiful. President Trump refers to America's interest as "ours" and "we" when he speaks of other nations cheating the US. This is a bid to unite the class interests of elites (billionaires and corporations, key donors to Democrats and Republicans) with workers. Thus the economic rise of China is a big target of distortion.
China's prominent trading partners help to form the grouping of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) nations. There is a BRICS summit in New Delhi, India set for September 12-13.
An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg.
Speaking of military operations, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced increased economic warfare against Iran plus any countries doing business with that Persian nation, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) met in Kyrgyzstan. Nations’ heads of state attending this gathering ranged from China, Russia, India, Iran, and Pakistan to Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The SCO also addressed measures to counter Uncle Sam’s deeds worldwide, including the US war against Iran and Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
In the SCO’s Bishkek declaration, the members also pledged to “support and strengthen an open, transparent, fair, inclusive, and non-discriminatory multilateral trading system based on generally accepted international principles and rules that promotes global economic development, ensures fair market access, and ensures special and differential treatment for developing countries.” Uncle Sam is looking at challenges to it alone calling the shots of a world order that gets its marching orders from Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the US is pursuing attempts to dominate other nations to boost the bottom line of America's elites.
Think of Uncle Sam’s taking of Venezuelan oil reserves, the details of which are emerging, glacially. Then there’s the talk from Washington of the US using tactical nuclear weapons to subdue Iran. The president has been threatening to take Greenland. He has also launched a trade war against Canada, a major US trading partner, claiming the neighbor to the north has been unfairly treating America.
Recall the president’s premise for his America First approach to jobs and economic gains? US global trade partners had been ripping off America. He was going to solve that problem, draining the swamp of Washington insider corruption, and so on. Wait. What?
For starters, US industry made the call to move abroad. To be clear, the deindustrialization of the Midwest and Northeast was a bipartisan priority that the political establishment facilitated, based on decisions made in corporate boardrooms. Democrats and Republicans supported corporate America moving production abroad to pursue higher returns on investment and weaker environmental policies.
Placing the drive for profits before the needs of the human population is the normal operation of the capitalist system. Ruling class interests use two-party politics to craft laws and policies that benefit elites, billionaires, and corporations.
The contradictions of economic nationalism and the world order are growing. An affordability crisis of working and poor people stateside as their tax dollars flow away from them and into the congressional-military-industrial complex is the tip of a proverbial iceberg. The worsening climate crisis that profits billionaires and corporations in the short-term as the political duopoly facilitates this ecocide is a wake-up call for movement politics.
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'Declare a Worldwide Climate Emergency': Death Toll in Nepal-Tibet Floods Tops 1,000
"The glacial collapse and deluge," one scientist said, "was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming."
Sep 01, 2026
With more than 1,000 people dead as of Tuesday and rescue teams still searching for the thousands missing after a glacial collapse in the Himalayas that created a flooding crisis in Nepal and Tibet last week, campaigners, politicians, and scientists reiterated the need for global climate action.
China confirmed at least 16 people are dead and 546 are missing in Tibet, including 261 foreign nationals, while Nepal reported 1,003 deaths and 3,916 more unaccounted for, including 583 foreigners, according to The Associated Press. Among those missing in Nepal are about 900 workers from a dozen hydropower projects, 500 of whom are believed to be trapped in tunnels.
Thousands have been rescued since last Wednesday, and as the AP noted, "authorities in Nepal have been burying bodies in temporary graves until they can be identified. They are preserving DNA samples, photographing distinguishing facial features, and recording other identifying details. Each body is assigned a reference number to help families identify and claim the remains later."
Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah has emphasized in recent days that "the flood in the Bhote Koshi River in Rasuwa was not an ordinary flood," and "it is now time for us to strongly raise with the international community the issue of the disasters we are experiencing as a result of climate change."
In a Monday interview with The New York Times, Maheshwar Dhakal from Nepal's Ministry of Agriculture, Forest, and Environment also linked the disaster to human-caused climate change and said that "those who have contributed the least are suffering the most."
Dhakal estimated the recovery cost at $5 billion, and shared his government's letter to the United Nations' fund for such disasters, which says in part that "early action in Nepal would send a signal that the fund is capable of responding with humanity, speed, flexibility, and solidarity when climate-vulnerable countries face losses and damages beyond their capacity to address alone."
Declare a world-wide #climate emergency www.nytimes.com/live/2026/08... #nepal #floods #flooding
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— Nikolas Kozloff (@nikolaskozloff.bsky.social) August 27, 2026 at 4:29 PM
Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, highlighted on social media Tuesday that experts have long warned about the kinds of disasters seen in the Himalayas over the past week.
"Why are climate scientists not surprised about mountains being destabilized by glacier melt and permafrost thaw?" he asked. "Because they have long predicted that as a result of global heating."
Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, wrote in a Tuesday column for The Guardian that "the increasingly temperamental behavior of the Earth beneath our feet teaches us that global heating is all-pervasive. It will intrude into every aspect of our lives and livelihoods, and leave no part of the planet untouched. As the world processes the horror of the events in Nepal and Tibet, it is a lesson that we ignore at our peril."
Also writing for the British newspaper on Tuesday, Michael Mann, a renowned climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, similarly stressed that "the glacial collapse and deluge in Nepal and Tibet was not a freak weather event; it was the structural failure of a mountain itself, nature's latest commentary on the deadly consequences of human-caused planetary warming. And it was the exclamation point on a summer of extremes, illustrating with a sole unnatural disaster the apocalyptic future that lies in store if we fail to take dramatic climate action."
Mann pointed to the lack of such action in the United States—the world's largest historical climate polluter—where President Donald Trump openly courted Big Oil on the campaign trail and has served the climate-wrecking fossil fuel industry's interests since returning to the White House last year, from declaring a national energy emergency and ditching the Paris Agreement, again, to waging a war on renewable power projects.
"Trump and enabling congressional Republicans continue to double down on policies favoring fossil fuel extraction and dependence at the very time we need to be moving even more quickly away from fossil fuels toward clean energy," Mann wrote. "These extreme events underscore the urgency of taking action now, and—while there are many things we can do—one of the greatest opportunities Americans will have to affect climate policy is the upcoming midterm election. You can make support for urgent and dramatic climate action a litmus test issue as you go to the voting booth."
Highlighting that dozens of Americans are among those still missing in Asia, the US-based watchdog group Public Citizen argued on social media Tuesday that "this isn't just a climate change catastrophe. It's a crime. For decades, Big Oil knew fossil fuels would lead to disasters like this. Big Oil must be held accountable."
In 2024, the group published a legal memo detailing how local or state prosecutors in the United States could bring criminal charges against Big Oil for deaths from extreme heat made more likely by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency. With rapidly advancing attribution science, the approach could also be applied to other disasters linked to the human-caused crisis.
Greenpeace International also demanded accountability for the industry on Tuesday, saying that "it makes us SICK to think of people losing their homes, their livelihoods, and the people they love to fires, floods, and storms, while fossil fuel companies make billions. A FRACTION of those obscene profits could help communities rebuild. MAKE POLLUTERS PAY."
"Make oil, coal, and gas corporations pay their fair share for the damage they cause," the advocacy group added. "Introduce new taxes or fines on them to help communities at home and around the world rebuild from climate disasters and invest in climate solutions."
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Iran Says Trump's New Attacks Show Americans 'Stuck in the Massive Error They’ve Made'
"We cannot accept any orders being dictated upon us," said the spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry. "If they continue with this philosophy, they will not get any different result.”
Sep 01, 2026
As US President Donald Trump returns to bombing Iranian territory, Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh, the spokesperson for Iran's Foreign Ministry, said at a press conference on Tuesday that it's only a sign of the quagmire he's found himself in, and emphasized that the only way out will be negotiation rather than force.
"It has become clear they are now stuck in the massive error they’ve made, and it’s their usual habit to raise excessive demands," Baghaei said, noting that mediation efforts by Pakistan were continuing even as the Trump administration claims that Iran is refusing "meaningful negotiations."
When Trump launched the war in February, he predicted that Iran would be brought to its knees in a matter of weeks. Six months later, there is no sign that an end to the conflict is in sight as Trump rejects a return to the negotiating table.
Baghaei said it's clear that the US was once again falling into "a state of miscalculation." Iran, he said, had been adhering to the Memorandum of Understanding reached in June, while the US refused to abide by its terms of ending its economic blockade, unfreezing assets, and ending threats of aggression, as well as ending attacks by US ally Israel in Lebanon.
Baghaei said Iran was willing to reach another agreement to end the war. The problem, he said, was that Trump had shown himself unwilling to follow any deal that included concessions to Iran and was demanding its full capitulation.
"We cannot accept any orders being dictated upon us," Baghaei said. "If they continue with this philosophy, they will not get any different result.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian echoed Baghaei's position on Tuesday, saying that Iran would “immediately reciprocate” if Washington honored its commitments under the June interim agreement.
Failing to break Iran with military might, Trump tried to switch last month to a strategy of "economic warfare," imposing "the toughest sanctions in history" and pressuring other nations around the world to do the same in an effort to isolate Iran and fully topple its government.
Baghaei acknowledged that US sanctions were having a devastating effect on the people of Iran. According to Reuters, Iran's foreign trade is down by 35%, and inflation reached 66% in July, cranking up the pain felt by the civilian population.
But efforts to create the "greatest coordinated economic isolation in the history of the world," as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described it, have faced resistance, with Iran's major trading partners such as China and Pakistan refusing to cut ties.
"Six months of US bombing and naval blockade have produced no US victory, so the plan now is to starve Iran into capitulation," wrote Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs and UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network adviser Sybil Fares on Monday for Al Jazeera. "The new approach is illegal, cruel, and will fail for several reasons."
"To begin with, there is the historical record. Economic sanctions do not bring down governments determined to survive them. Yes, sanctions can impoverish populations, empower the security services that control smuggling, and hand the targeted nation a rallying point built on US malice," Sachs and Fares wrote.
They added that at a time when Iran's restrictions on travel through the Strait of Hormuz have spiked oil prices and sent shocks through the global economy, there is little incentive for the world to cut off Iran's oil exports as well.
"The US proposes to deepen a stagflationary shock already being borne by Europe, Japan, and its other allies, and orders those countries to enforce sanctions that will throttle their economies," they wrote.
And due to Trump's erratic policy, disregard for the United Nations Charter in launching a war of aggression, and the demonstration that his assurances are "unreliable," Sachs and Fares noted that countries are increasingly reaching agreements that rely less on US military guarantees and dollar-based trade.
"Pride goeth before the fall, and no government today is more arrogant than the US under Trump and his enforcer, Bessent," they wrote. "Governments around the world will not follow the US blindly into disaster."
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