Who Gets Run Over
AI has ascended to the role of main character, and when Donald Trump traveled to Beijing for a historic summit last week, AI was one of the central topics of his discussions with Xi Jinping. The Atlantic said the president brought along some of the United States’ most powerful AI executives, including Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, a neat little parade of corporate power walking straight into state diplomacy. The United States and China remain locked in a technological arms race, and the most important issues in U.S.-China relations are tariffs, Taiwan and AI.
The hierarchy is plain enough: political leaders and the bosses of the AI industry are at the table, while ordinary people are left to absorb the fallout. The Atlantic said political leaders and pundits including Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon have put AI center stage, while the backlash against data centers is loud and inescapable. It said the specter of AI-driven layoffs hangs heavy, as does the threat of advanced hacking bots capable of taking down electrical grids and breaking into banks.
The Corporate Race
The Atlantic said Anthropic and OpenAI are racing to be listed on stock markets in what will likely be two of the largest public offerings in history. Silicon Valley has spent ungodly sums on AI and data centers, and Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google alone have already spent more on data centers since the launch of ChatGPT than the federal government spent to build the entire interstate highway system. Those expenditures are set to grow, even as consensus opinions on whether all this spending constitutes an economic bubble fluctuate every few months.
That is the machinery of accumulation in full view: giant firms pouring money into infrastructure that serves their own expansion, while the costs and risks are socialized outward. The article does not describe a system built for the people who will live with the consequences; it describes a race among institutions with enough capital to reshape the landscape and enough influence to make the rest of society adapt.
What People Are Left With
The Atlantic said there will never again be a graduating class that experienced even a year of college without ChatGPT, and that recent leaps in deepfake tools make it harder than ever to assume that any given post on social media is human-made. Those are not abstract technical milestones; they are changes imposed on everyday life by a corporate and state apparatus that keeps moving faster than the people expected to live inside it.
The Washington Post said China has been crushing the United States in lithium battery manufacturing, and that the AI boom is allowing the U.S. battery industry to pivot to the data center business. In other words, industrial priorities shift wherever profit and strategic competition point them, while workers and communities are expected to follow the new script.
Order, Control, and the Camera State
The Washington Post also said the House Foreign Affairs Committee has advanced a suite of export control legislation. That is the familiar language of managed competition: lawmakers tightening the screws, calling it policy, and leaving the underlying arms race intact.
At the local level, the same logic shows up in smaller but no less revealing forms. The Washington Post said the use of AI-enabled license plate cameras has caused a civic uproar in Troy, New York, pointing to a fundamental tension in law enforcement’s use of AI. The cameras are not neutral tools; they are part of the surveillance apparatus, and the uproar shows that people can see the shape of the cage even when it comes wrapped in the language of efficiency.
The Washington Post newsletter was by Benjamin Guggenheim and published May 18, 2026 at 3:37 p.m. EDT. The story it assembled is one of concentrated power: state leaders, corporate executives, and security institutions pushing AI forward, while layoffs, surveillance, and instability are handed down to everyone else.