Thomas L. Friedman Sept. 22, 2026 Credit... Austin Irving“Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” That’s what President Trump said about the Covid-19 outbreak on Feb. 10, 2020, about a month before it forced our country and the world into a lengthy lockdown.

Why do I recall that today? Because when I think back on the biggest disaster stories I have covered — including 9/11 and Covid-19 — I am struck that they have one big thing in common: a failure of imagination. So today, when it comes to the possibility that artificial intelligence, which is falling into the hands of rogue actors and is beginning to manifest a will of its own, could become incredibly destabilizing, my imagination is fully engaged. It is telling me that the big A.

I. companies in America and China are not being candid with us about how little even they understand the power and reach of the models they have developed. It is telling me that the Trump administration is uniquely unsuited to the kind of comprehensive, sustained, coordinated governance that keeping A. I. safe demands.

And it is telling me that there is so much at stake — economically, militarily and technologically — and so little trust between Washington and Beijing that it would take a miracle for the United States and China to agree on the kind of deep collaboration needed to defuse the most nightmarish threats posed by A. I. It is still not too late, though, for radical rethinking before something very bad happens.

I’d rather be remembered as the boy who cried wolf when the wolf never came than as someone who got eaten by it. So here goes: “Wolf, wolf, wolf, wolf.” I will stand down when I see the United States and China start to address the immediate threat by teaming up to defend critical infrastructure — water systems, power grids, the internet — in their own countries and around the world. But I will breathe a sigh of relief only when I see Washington and Beijing put their heads together with their respective A.

I. companies to draw up a long-term plan for how they can continue to compete on A. I. technologies, while simultaneously agreeing on internal A. I. guardrails to prevent increasingly capable A.

I. systems from, on their own, creating catastrophic cybersecurity, biological, nuclear or financial risks. This a geopolitical, geoeconomic and technological challenge no generation of American and Chinese statesmen has ever before faced. They dodge it at their, and our, peril.

I sincerely hope a strategy along these lines is what comes out of Thursday’s summit in Washington between Trump and President Xi Jinping. A. I.’s potential to deliver transformational breakthroughs in energy, biology, new materials and drug discovery is unprecedented.

But so too are its risks. We need a way to get A. I.’s best and cushion against its worst — and we do not have that today.

Until there is a U.S.-China agreement to ensure that the A. I. agents that the world’s two A. I. superpowers are developing will operate only in ways that are consonant with human flourishing, and be kept that way, I am in the slow-this-thing-down-until-we-are-sure-we-can-control-it camp.