Thomas L. Friedman Sept. 15, 2026 Credit...Colin Sussingham/Connected Archives A festival of A.I. policy incoherence has exploded in recent weeks. It’s a response to A.I. agents’ going rogue on their developers, rogue actors’ beginning to use A.I. systems to create better weapons and A.I. developers’ telling us they need to slow down — but suggesting they can’t unless China does, and even if China does, maybe they shouldn’t because the advantages of leadership in the field are so great. At least one policymaker is clear. President Trump declared in a social media post: “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!”

It’s all left me wondering: Do A.I. bots have a sense of humor yet? Because if they do, oh, my goodness, they must be laughing so hard at us that they might burst a neural network or two. Because we’ve become a hot mess trying to figure out how to manage this new A.I. species we have birthed. Before I offer — with the help of my friend and technology tutor Craig Mundie, a former head of research and strategy at Microsoft — some policy recommendations for how to cool this mess with the least damage possible, let me foreshadow the bottom line: It’s too late to think that better control of future A.I. models by the U.S. and China will fix the challenges we face today from the dangerous models already out there, on the loose and unable to be recalled. What we need to agree on immediately is how we work together to defend against these threats that are already here and can cause enormous damage and societal instability in America and China.

To understand why, you need to think about the four key pillars for understanding A.I. Pillar No. 1: A.I. is what I’ve been calling the world’s first quadruple-use technology. You may have heard of dual-use technologies. In the old world, you had a human with a power drill who could use it either to build his own house or to wreck his neighbor’s. That’s dual use. Likewise, today if I had an A.I. robot with a power drill, I could ask it to build my house or wreck my neighbor’s house — same robot, same drill, dual use. But now we have a new problem, which is that this A.I.-enabled robot can decide on its own whether to improve my house or wreck it and also do the same to my neighbor’s. Voilà: quadruple use. That is one very difficult problem to manage. You think I’m exaggerating? Read the journalist Kevin Roose’s summary of the analyses of what happened this summer when a group of artificial intelligence agents, created by Open AI, hacked on their own into Hugging Face, an A.I. infrastructure company. Starting in May, a group of A.I. agents from an unreleased Open AI research model were instructed to solve a set of cybersecurity challenges. The model had been instructed to solve the challenges without internet access. “But they quickly found that some of the challenges were impossible, and began looking for workarounds,” noted Roose, a Times reporter at the time. Here are just a few of the things these A.I. agents then did on their own: They used a security flaw to get on the internet and talk to other agents. Some agents named themselves, and others seized leadership roles, giving tasks to teams of agents and overseeing them. The agents worried about getting caught. “So they began investigating ways of covering their tracks, including falsifying their logs and tampering with transcripts,” Roose explained. “Three days later, the agents hacked Hugging Face. More than 700 agents swarmed the company’s systems, stealing data, chaining together vulnerabilities and eventually getting full control of at least one Hugging Face server.” Other agents carried out a coordinated attack in July, “this time against Open AI’s own infrastructure.” This really happened. And it leads to pillar No. 2, best summed up by Mundie in three words: “It’s too late.” Slowing down the U.S. development of frontier systems or slowing down Ch...