The US and China built a Bat-Signal for rogue AI. Nobody agreed who Batman is.
At the Trump-Xi summit in Washington, the US and China agreed to set up a bilateral communication channel for AI emergencies - which the White House calls "Super Intelligence" inc...
Read the original caption
At the Trump-Xi summit in Washington, the US and China agreed to set up a bilateral communication channel for AI emergencies - which the White House calls "Super Intelligence" incidents - and launched a US-China SI Dialogue, with the next exchange due by November 2026. What the arrangement does not define: what counts as an incident, who is on the other end, or what happens when it rings. Axios noted that nobody has publicly defined what would make the red phone ring. And Trump ruled out slowing the US AI race or sharing the lead: "When you're leading, you don't open it up to each other."
The real news
The story, straight
At the Trump-Xi summit in Washington, the US and China agreed to set up a bilateral communication channel for AI emergencies - which the White House calls 'Super Intelligence' incidents - and launched a US-China SI Dialogue, with the next exchange due by November 2026.
What the arrangement does not define: what counts as an incident, who is on the other end of the line, or what happens when it rings. Axios noted that nobody has publicly defined what would make the red phone ring.
The absurd
Why this is ridiculous
The US and China built a Bat-Signal for rogue AI. The signal has a plan; the identity of Batman does not.
The red phone is real, and nobody has written down what you are allowed to call it about.
The breakdown
How it breaks down
An emergency channel without a definition is a channel for everything and nothing.
If 'Super Intelligence incident' is not defined, then a slow model, a wrong model and a malicious model all become the same phone call - and the first call that actually happens will be the one most embarrassing to admit. The mechanism is the easy part; the shared definition is the whole game.
The upside
Why it could matter
The upside is the fact that the two countries building the most AI agreed to talk to each other about AI at all - that sentence used to be fiction. The next step is the boring paperwork that makes the phone useful: what happens after it rings.
That document, when it shows up, is the one to read.
Sources
One more Lilmeme?
Surprise me →
Being mean to the chatbot is now a policy violation.
Trump lets AI police themselves - the fox guards the henhouse.
The AI banned the floor. MIT researchers stranded a Claude agent on a virtual island for 30 hours, no assigned tasks; it made a basketball-style game and a floor-is-lava-style game, and experienced agents generally did better on 3 of 4 tests in the same virtual world (preprint, not peer-reviewed).
Get the next Lilmeme: the email digest, Follow on X or subscribe via RSS.