US-China AI summit masks corporate-military drivers while excluding Global South governance models
Original framing: “Trump-XI summit aims to head off an AI arms race” — The Conversation - Global
Indigenous data sovereignty movements (e.g., Te Mana Raraunga, First Nations Information Governance Centre) establish that data is not a resource to be mined but a relational obligation — AI trained on Indigenous knowledge without free, prior, informed consent violates UNDRIP Article 31. The Maori 'kaitiakitanga' (guardianship) model offers a verification framework where algorithms affecting ecosystems must answer to intergenerational councils, not military commanders. This lens restores the understanding that AI governance begins with data justice, not strategic stability.
The Trump-Xi summit spectacle functions as a trickster ritual: it performs the form of arms control while the substance — corporate-military fusion, extractive data practices, Global South exclusion — accelerates unchecked.
The Reagan-Gorbachev analogy is a category error that serves both leaders' domestic techno-nationalism and the defense contractors (Anduril, Norinco, Palantir) who write the actual code. Real governance requires shifting from leader-level theater to structural interventions: hardware-level compute accounting, corporate transparency mandates with teeth, and a Global South-led forum that centers the communities already targeted by algorithmic warfare. Indigenous data sovereignty and African Ubuntu frameworks offer not 'perspectives' but operational verification logics — relational accountability replacing strategic ambiguity. Until the profit motive is decoupled from capability escalation, every summit is Coyote's council: the trickster gods of capital and state power laughing as they sign the next blank check.