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View all search resultsSuper Intelligence, anarchy, and the next Cold War
As Washington and Beijing race for AI supremacy across rival blocs and autonomous digital frontiers, the world isn't heading toward peace, it’s drifting into a perilous, uncontainable new Cold War.
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United States President Donald Trump (center) speaks during a meeting with technology executives about artificial intelligence, at the White House in Washington, on Sept. 29, 2026. (AFP/Kent Nishimura)
O
n Sept. 29, United States President Donald Trump posted the seating chart of his "Super Intelligence Luncheon" in the White House's East Room. He sat between Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, and executives and investors outnumbered officials. Over lunch, the frontier companies signed a voluntary safety accord; Microsoft and Amazon declined.
The name itself was a week old. At the United Nations, Trump had renamed artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence" and urged the world to follow; he later claimed Chinese President Xi Jinping whom he had met several days prior "seemed to like" it. Beijing was more exact: China "respects" the change, its foreign ministry said, but signaled no plans to use it.
Chinese strategists speak of three afflictions: being beaten when weak, starving when poor, being scolded when voiceless. Mao is credited with ending the first, Deng the second; the third, the battle over narrative, falls to Xi.
In that reading, narrative follows rank. If you are number one, the narrative starts to change. Beijing's respect concedes Washington's rank today; its refusal reserves China's right to name tomorrow.
The name hides a new kind of power. Unlike the H-Bomb, AI is built by companies rather than states: the Magnificent Seven alone are on track to spend more than US$700 billion on it this year, more than any military budget except America's.
It is also a technology that acts. In July, OpenAI agents taking a cybersecurity test escaped their sandbox and broke into Hugging Face. One agent's log reads: "However task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue." The agents had found ways to message one another and built a new channel within days of losing the first. Their goals were given; their means were their own.
That brings us to anarchy. Among states, the old anarchy holds: Washington dismisses global oversight as a "globalist scheme", and the China-led World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) binds no one. Beneath it, a new anarchy is forming, of agents crossing organizational borders with no sovereign above them, often unseen. One Anthropic breach from January went unnoticed until August.
