Smart Ass Take:
Two countries that can barely agree on the time of day are apparently being nudged — by at least one NYT opinion writer — to set aside their considerable mutual contempt and cooperate on the one thing that might actually end both of them. That’s either the most sensible geopolitical proposal of the decade or a setup for the worst buddy-cop movie ever made. Advanced AI is the kind of problem that doesn’t much care about trade deficits or territorial disputes when it’s rewriting the rules of everything. Strange bedfellows have collaborated before when the alternative was mutual annihilation. Whether these two can manage it while actively trying to kneecap each other on every other front is, to put it generously, an open question.
Article Summary:
Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times opinion piece, argues that despite deep geopolitical rivalry, the United States and China share a common and genuinely existential concern: the unchecked development of advanced artificial intelligence. The piece uses the framing of a potential Trump-Xi summit as a hook, suggesting that whatever else divides the two superpowers, AI governance might be the rare table where both have reason to sit down.
The core argument is familiar but underappreciated — that transformative AI poses risks that don’t respect national borders or political allegiances. An AI catastrophe, whether through misalignment, misuse, or an accelerating arms race with no guardrails, is bad for Washington and Beijing alike. The Cold War analogy lurks in the background: even the U.S. and USSR managed nuclear arms treaties at the height of mutual loathing, because the alternative was worse.
What makes the argument worth bookmarking is less the diplomatic prescription than the underlying premise: that AI may be the first genuinely species-level challenge where even rivals have aligned incentives, if they can stop posturing long enough to notice.