An Open Letter to President Donald J. Trump: The AI Deal of the Century Is Yours to Strike
For Immediate Release
Date: May 12, 2026
From: Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI (Rome, Italy)
THE DEAL IN ONE PAGE
What: A bold US–China-led AI treaty to reliably future-proof US economic leadership, definitively contain China, and prevent AI's cyber, chemical, nuclear and loss of control risks.
Why: Avoid a China-US ASI race that only ASI can win. Avoid widely feared AI catastrophes. Ensure all Americans share the wealth and power AI will create. Realize the legacy unmatched by any of history's statesmen, untouchable and widely cherished.
Who wants it: President Xi and 77% of voters and 78% of Republicans say they want a strong treaty. Most major AI lab CEOs. Bannon, Beck, Rogan, Carlson and Christian leaders.
Timelines: Experts believe extremely disruptive AI capabilities or accidents are plausible even within 6-12 months, so pursuing now.
First steps: Verify Chinese interest. Appoint a classified commission. Appoint shared US-China working groups. Once jointly launched, the process will involve thousands and special diplomatic infrastructure, a US-China-led global Apollo Program for Human-First AI.
Assets: 24 experts of our coalition have spent 15 months elaborating a 350-page Strategic Memo of the Deal of the Century to provide initial feasibility, actionable paths and major potential support among key influential individuals.
Dear President Trump,
As you depart tomorrow for Beijing, we want to help you turn this year's meetings with Xi into an unparalleled historic political opportunity. Many pressing issues are on the table — Iran, trade, Taiwan, supply chains — but the one that will soon define your legacy, and the 2028 election, is AI.
A large majority of your voters are ever more concerned about AI taking away their jobs, livelihood, and even life. But only the two of you, together, can resolve or even mitigate those concerns.
Substantial benefits will no doubt derive from deals with China your team reportedly explores and other undisclosed ones. Yet, there is a giant deal on the table that can be radically more beneficial for you and Americans. Only you can strike it as it needs the extraordinary vision these unique times require — a vision unseen since 1945.
The opportunity is to co-lead with Xi a bold U.S.–China-led AI treaty that secures American leadership to prevent AI systems from going beyond human control, ensuring American citizens will share in the wealth and power that AI creates.
Within an hour from your birth at Jamaica Hospital in Queens at 10:54 a.m. on June 14, 1946, just across the East River, President Truman's advisor Bernard Baruch rose before the UN Atomic Energy Commission to propose what remains by far history's boldest treaty proposal.
The Baruch Plan sought to place all dangerous nuclear assets, materials, and facilities under international federal control, with enforcement not subject to any single nation’s veto — while preserving American leadership and economic primacy.
The plan did not pass. The diplomatic infrastructure of 1946 was thin, but the deeper failure was strategic — and it was made inside Truman's own cabinet.
Back in September 1945, the Secretary of War Henry Stimson had urged Truman to find a bilateral deal with Moscow on such a plan, instead of following a UN-process, warning that "action of any international group of nations… would not be taken seriously by the Soviets." This is just about what you stated last September to the UN Security Council, via Kratsios, that "cooperation of statesmen" and not a UN-process was needed to govern AI.
At a dramatic September 21 cabinet meeting, Stimson's logic was overruled by his colleagues, while supported by Acheson and Wallace. Truman sided with the room. The U.S. then took the plan to its Western allies first and to Moscow second — and the Soviets, reading it as an accomplished fact rather than a deal between equals, walked away. Stimson had been right. He had not been heeded.
You have a chance to succeed where Truman failed, this time for AI, in a very similar political context, and on terms far more favorable than he ever had.
This deal cannot be done by a normal president. It requires someone Xi respects and sees as a peer, and you are likely the only Western leader he does. It requires someone willing to negotiate boldly and frankly, without the multilateral apparatus that hampered every other president. It requires the deal-maker's instinct for when a counterparty is ready. Three of those conditions exist for the first time in eighty years — and only in you.
Why Is a New AI Strategy Needed Now?
Your bold AI growth policies and initiatives ensure the US continues to lead the world in AI, staving off the risks of China's AI domination. Kratsios, Sacks, Helberg, and Krishnan have built the lead. This deal is what locks the US lead in. The same team that gave you the runway is now positioned to give you the landing.
Yet, AI's next stage is upon us, and a radical new policy is needed. Concerns are mounting — scientists, voters, AI lab leaders, media personalities and your advisors — in regards to the concentration of power, job loss, loss of control, human replacement or disempowerment, and post-humanist futures.
Americans' concern is fast rising. 63% of Americans believe humanity will lose control of AI; 53% believe AI may destroy humanity. 57% disagree that it will benefit "everyday people".
Americans definitely don't like how ungoverned AI is turning out, and are scared as hell. But the upsides are astounding as well. It's a political liability waiting to be turned into an unmatched opportunity.
The Opportunity: A Historic Deal with China for AI Safety and Future-Proofing US Economic Leadership
Recent news about fast-increasing AI cyber and biological unwanted behaviors, like Mythos, are pressuring you to consider requiring AI models safety licensing prior to release, a measure that can never be fully reconciled with the ASI race with China. The US cannot resolve or even mitigate such concerns just by itself, since unilateral regulation loses ground to China without containing it at all.
That's why the only way is a historic and bold US-China-led AI treaty.
The political ground is ready: 77% of US voters — including 78% of Republicans — support a strong international AI agreement. This is the rare issue where your base, the center, and even your critics already agree with you.
A wide MAGA and bipartisan movement is growing for a treaty to ban ASI, and prevent AI concentration of power, including the Pro-human AI movement, The Human Movement, and Humans First. Bannon thinks loss of human control (i.e. singularity) could happen in 12-18 months and so has been calling for "immediate treaties" for AI. With Glenn Beck and many others, he has signed a call to ban Superintelligence. Rogan and Carlson have been similarly vocal on AI risk.
Most AI lab leaders, while rightly pushing forward in the absence of a global deal on AI, have been crying out for greater global governance of safety risks, while recently growing skeptical. Sam Altman called for an "IAEA for AI" and said the US should "try really hard" for a US-China AI safety deal. Musk has been calling for stronger regulation for AI for 10 years, warning for a decade that AI was more dangerous than nukes. Amodei has been the most outspoken lab CEO on extinction risks and recently said a treaty becomes plausible if focused on banning the most dangerous architectures, with credible verification.
Yet, full support of those influential AI lab leaders requires that the treaty-making process be carefully conceived to avoid the resulting treaty reliably turning into global authoritarianism, anti-innovation bureaucracy, or excessive concentration power, and successfully prevent anyone from building ASI. Many of them, alongside Peter Thiel, see those risks as worse than taking the immense gamble of letting ASI take over, even acknowledging the risk of extinction (as do Thiel, Musk, Amodei, and Altman).
Christian leaders would also be on your side, as many of them have called for regulating AI. The Pope's key AI advisor Benanti has coordinated an appeal for a binding AI treaty, and so did his predecessor Pope Francis. In May 2025, Vance deferred to the Pope on AI ethics and seemingly AI safety. Catholic Rubio is well-placed to help shape a diplomatic opening given his prudent approach to China and neutral approach so far on AI.
An effective global enforcement of an AI treaty inescapably requires uptake by at least a dozen of the most powerful nations. This should be done via effective treaty-making methods: with vote-weighting terms that protect U.S. and Chinese leadership, and prevent a UN-style one-country-one-vote outcome you've rightly rejected.
The Coalition IS Already Converging
Five constituencies. One destination. One isolated voice against.
The convergence is across populist, technological, religious, electoral, and institutional lines.
The opposition rests on a single argument from a single Silicon Valley faction.
Beyond Safety and Leadership: Ensuring All Americans Benefit from and Control AI
While a US-China-led treaty can deliver immense peace and safety to Americans, it would not, by itself, deliver one thing your voters — and many AI lab leaders — increasingly expect: a guarantee that all Americans, not just a few coastal billionaires, share in the wealth and power AI creates.
Business leaders are proposing radical solutions in the form of European-style AI wealth redistributive schemes, such as Musk's Universal High-Income proposal or Amodei's repeated warnings and proposals. Even Larry Fink, CEO of the largest AI investor, called for some redistribution by warning of social unrest. Yet, the idea of "AI dividend" hand-outs for citizens is bureaucratic and un-American. Those hand-outs are easily unwound by any future administration, and do not give Americans any voice in their AI future. The American way is ownership.
Citizen co-ownership schemes were successfully implemented by the Alaska Permanent Fund to share with all Alaskans the windfall of state oil, by Reagan's Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Margaret Thatcher's 1980s privatization program which made most Britons shareholders.
But you could go far beyond those partial successes, and you are halfway there. A natural evolution of your U.S. Sovereign Wealth Fund and Genesis Mission could ensure every American family holds a direct stake in a leading AI and robotics firm — whose value largely derives from our collective knowledge.
Sam Altman has argued for variants of citizen AI co-ownership for years; Bannon, Beck, and the emerging Human Movement have made it MAGA-coded; you can be the President who actually delivers it.
To make this durable, the treaty itself should require every signatory — including China — to guarantee its citizens a meaningful ownership stake in its leading AI and robotics firms, by means each nation designs for itself. No future U.S. administration could quietly unwind what you build. No competitor could undercut Americans by letting a handful of insiders capture the entire AI upside. This is not global licensing or international control of industry — it is a mutual floor of citizen ownership, sovereignly implemented.
Effective citizens' shareholder oversight should be ensured, while safeguarding competent and efficient management, via proper proxy voting and citizens' shareholder assemblies.
Citizen shareholders, not citizen managers. Voting rights, dividends, transparency — without the operational interference that would slow the very firms whose performance Americans now depend on.
The Window Is Closing
US AI capability lead over China, illustrative
Each month of delay reduces what America can demand from Beijing.
By 2028, the asymmetric leverage that makes a treaty possible no longer exists.
Next Steps
In January 1946, Truman convened a small classified Board of Consultants, led by Oppenheimer, Deputy Secretary of State Acheson, and other leading minds to assess the scientific and diplomatic feasibility of international nuclear proliferation controls. They delivered after two months the Acheson–Lilienthal Report, a blueprint for the Baruch Plan.
We propose you do the same: leverage your team to convene a classified Board of Consultants on the AI Deal of the Century. Distinct in mission and tempo from any standing advisory body, like PCAST, its sole charge would be to assess the feasibility, enforcement architecture and strategic case for a US–China-led AI agreement.
We recommend you ask your most loyal advisors with relevant portfolios or expertise to participate personally and through chosen envoys: the White House, State, National Security Advisors, ODNI, OSTP, NSA, aligned frontier AI lab CEOs (e.g. Altman, Amodei, Musk, Suleyman/Smith, and Hassabis/Brin), media and financial leaders, and top AI scientists.
And to avoid Truman's mistake, we recommend that you establish a Joint US-China AI Treaty Feasibility Commission — gradually extending it to other middle powers — as soon as initial interest is validated with President Xi. This way, shared scientific and strategic underpinnings, as well as enforcement mechanisms for a mutually acceptable deal, can emerge early on boosting mutual confidence and trust.
Our 356-page Strategic Memo maps the case, the architecture and likely allies of such a treaty-making process. Our closed-door Washington convening, September 15–16, 2026 — The Cooperation of Statesmen — is designed to bring key experts and advisors that can help you properly frame, manage and communicate the Deal of the Century, to ensure it is a great success.
Your Greatest Deal Ever
A treaty of this magnitude would let you leave office in January 2029 as history's most consequential American President - achieving a legacy unparalleled by any leader in history — revered at home and worldwide.
A President who prevents the most plausible self-extinction event in history would become politically untouchable. Your legacy would not be defended by lawyers or partisans, but by the gratitude of a country — and a civilization — that survived because you acted in time.
The window is measured in months. The history of the 21st century is being written now. No one else can sign it.
Respectfully,
Rufo Guerreschi
Founder & Executive Director
Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI
rufo@trustlesscomputing.org | cbpai.org
The Coalition for a Baruch Plan for AI brings together 10 US and international NGOs and over 40 advisors and contributors, including former leaders from the NSA, WEF, Yale, and Princeton.
