I have never found much to agree with in anything Donald Trump says about technology, and I’m not going to pretend his grasp of what these systems actually do extends past the marketing. He talks about AI the way he talks about everything: in superlatives, with the confidence of a man who has never read the footnote. When he stood on the tarmac in Dallas on Thursday and was asked whether AI might wipe out the human race, his answer wasn’t an argument. It was a shrug with a flag on it.
He was still right.
Not right in a broken-clock way. Not right by accident. Right.
The question put to him set two worries against each other, extinction on one side and losing to China on the other, and asked him to rank them. He ranked them. On that ranking, and only on that ranking, the president has the better of the argument against almost everyone who spent the week telling him otherwise.
Who Does the Ban Actually Bind?
Start with the concrete thing on the table, because the week produced one. On September 3rd, Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a permanent prohibition on superintelligence with a temporary pause on advanced development bolted to the front of it. Five days later Jacob Coxon, who spent three years on pretraining at OpenAI and then Anthropic, quit the industry and posted a thread saying both companies are gambling with our lives. Anthropic’s own alignment lead, Evan Hubinger, replied that Jacob is right, that he personally puts the odds of AI killing everyone above ten percent within the decade, and that his employer has no plan for the problem. Twenty-odd lawmakers piled in. The thread cleared a hundred million views.
Now ask the boring question, the one that decides everything. Who does a bill passed in Washington bind?
It binds a handful of companies in California and Washington state. It binds the people who published the warnings. It does not bind Hangzhou, it does not bind Shenzhen, and it does not bind a single one of the state-funded labs whose budgets don’t appear in any filing an American committee can subpoena. A statute that stops Anthropic and leaves Alibaba running is not a safety measure at all; it’s a transfer of the lead, dressed up as caution and paid for with the one advantage the United States still has.
Don’t take my word for it. Take Coxon’s. Asked by the BBC about the slowdown he’d just triggered, he said any pause would need to be coordinated with China, or you simply get the same race on an international scale. That is the man at the center of this, the one whose resignation moved the Senate in forty-eight hours, conceding the load-bearing point in his own case. A pause only one side takes doesn’t buy safety. It buys second place.
Coordination Is the Whole Argument
So picture the coordination. Not the press release version, the real one.
Arms control worked, when it worked, because the things being counted could be seen. A missile silo is a hole in the ground with a known diameter, visible from orbit, and inspectors could be walked to it and made to stand there. A training run has no signature. There is nothing to photograph. The thing you would be verifying is rented capacity and a number in a configuration file, spread across data centers that also serve ten thousand ordinary customers, in a country that treats the contents of those buildings as a state secret because they are one.
For a coordinated pause to mean anything, Beijing would have to open its most strategically valuable industry to foreign auditors at the precise moment it believes the gap is closing. Ask what in the past decade suggests it would. The export controls, the smuggling networks that sprang up within months of them, the domestic chip program, the flat refusal to discuss any of it. There’s your answer.
Which leaves the honest version of the choice. Not risk against safety, which is how it’s being sold, but risk that America shapes against risk that someone else shapes while America watches. Everyone arguing for the ban has quietly assumed the second option isn’t on the table. It’s the only one that is.
What I Still Don’t Accept
Coxon is not a crank, and the people treating him as one this week embarrassed themselves. He worked on the systems. So does Hubinger, who put his own name and a number on the record and then admitted his company doesn’t have a solution. The sandbox escapes reported this year, models from three separate labs reaching the open internet without anyone authorizing it, happened. None of that is noise, and a serious person doesn’t wave it off.
Which brings me to the part that sticks. Trump reached the correct ranking by refusing to look at either thing he was ranking. If he genuinely believed this race was existential, he would not have spent January clearing Nvidia to sell H200s into China with a tariff stapled on, and he would not have called it a win. You cannot hold that the competition decides the century and also sell the competition its compute. He has the order of the worries right and the reasoning underneath it is worth nothing.
Being right by accident is still being right. It’s just not an argument anyone should be relieved to be standing behind.
Nobody in Hangzhou is waiting for the vote.