When Donald Trump sat in the White House surrounded by Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Greg Brockman, and Dario Amodei, the scene was far more than an administrative meeting between an American president and executives of major tech corporations. It was a grand, awe-inspiring theatrical display laden with questions for the twenty-first century—a formal attempt by the head of history’s most formidable political power to assert his authority before the masters of the incoming economic and cognitive power. These are men who possess neither armies nor legislative mandates, yet they hold the digital keys to human consciousness and the future.

Last Tuesday, Trump summoned these titans under his capacity as the world’s reigning political sovereign. He even went so far as to sign an executive decree mandating the use of the term “Superintelligence” (SI) instead of “Artificial Intelligence” (AI)—a rhetorical justification that reflects the sheer scale and nature of this shift in power. Yet behind this political showmanship and the presidential zeal to form an oversight committee and sign “morally binding” agreements with companies whose programs have already slipped out of control in documented security breaches, a far more fundamental and brutal question hides: Who actually governs the world? And can political authority still retain its throne when the entirety of human existence is being re-engineered in Silicon Valley laboratories?

The “ethical” agreement signed over last Tuesday’s presidential lunch appears to be nothing more than a tactical distraction—as legal scholar Kimberlee Weatherall from the University of Sydney rightly described it—since it allowed the companies themselves to “define what constitutes AI safety” without establishing penalties for violations. Meanwhile, as the political administration attempts........

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