EP007: The Elephant and the Dragon

The Trump-Xi summit just wrapped in Beijing. Both leaders agreed on one thing: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. They agreed on almost nothing about AI. The framework they produced — a mutual incident notification system — is real, and thin. This was round one. But the US-China AI relationship isn't only playing out in summit rooms. It's playing out in county permit hearings in Virginia and Ohio, in UN standards bodies, in fusion labs, and in a government archive of 162 declassified files describing physics no one has explained yet. Kyle, Kate, and Morgan break down what the summit actually resolved, what the five real AI stakes are, why foreign state media is showing up at American permit hearings, and what it means that AI is now finding physics in plasma that human researchers missed entirely.