Elevator Pitch

The Deal of the Century is a campaign — by a coalition of 10 NGOs, 20 advisors, and 24 contributors — aimed at persuading and catalyzing a critical mass of humanist key potential influencers of Trump's AI policy to pitch Trump:

1. a bold, timely and proper US-China-led AI treaty-making process; and

2. a durable mechanism to ensure citizens' sharing of AI power and wealth.

We constantly update a 356-page Strategic Memo including an in-depth feasibility analysis and 150 pages of tailored persuasion analysis. We engage in remote and in-person outreach via DC and Bay Area tours and will host a September 15–16, 2026 closed-door DC roundtable with local partners.

Targets of the campaign include US officials (including Kratsios, Rubio, Vance, Bessent, and Wiles); political and media figures (including Bannon, Carlson, Beck, DeSantis and Rogan); and AI lab leaders (including Amodei, Altman, Hassabis, Musk and Sutskever).

One-Pager

The race to Artificial Superintelligence is forcing humanity toward one of three irreversible outcomes: loss of control to AI, entrenched global authoritarianism, or a safe future secured by a bold, timely, and well-designed AI treaty. Intermediate results are highly unlikely.

Given the extreme global concentration of AI power, Xi's consistent calls for global AI governance, and ever-shorter ASI timelines — like it or not, President Trump’s future AI policy will largely determine Humanity's future.‍ ‍

Trump's AI policy is currently dominated by an ultra-libertarian, hands-off, de-facto post-humanist stance on the race to ASI — largely inspired by Peter Thiel and the US officials closest to him (Kratsios, Sacks, Helberg, Vance) and tacitly backed by roughly half of AI-lab leaders (Page, Brin, Huang, Zuckerberg).

Thiel is fiercely against any AI treaty, warning it would lead to global authoritarianism. While this is a real and crucial concern, shared by most humanist AI lab leaders, he seems to ignore almost completely that, if AI remains unregulated — and does not result in extinction, something he shockingly appears unconcerned about — it would certainly lead to a global authoritarianism or oligarchy, and he is among the most well-positioned for such a role. 

Yet, this approach is highly minoritarian among citizens and other powerbrokers. By now, 63% of US voters believe it's likely that "humans won't be able to control it anymore," 53% believe "AI will destroy humanity" is somewhat or very likely, and 77% of them support a strong international AI treaty.

Most key potential influencers of Trump’s AI policy (unknowingly to each other) are increasingly concerned or calling for a treaty in one way or another — including Bannon, Carlson, Rogan, and most leaders of frontier labs (Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, and Suleyman), and partly Sacks and Musk. Others, like Rubio and Gabbard, are likely to join for conviction and political expediency.

Yet, Trump is far from this radical ideology, he is the ultimate pragmatic politician. Xi has repeatedly called for global AI governance. Four Trump-Xi summits are planned for 2026, starting in May. Trump's approval ratings have been consistently low, in the thirties. This political liability can be turned into the opportunity of a lifetime.

What's missing is not public support, but a concerted pitch by a critical mass of people Trump trusts standing up for the silent majority, while addressing in fine detail and head-on Thiel’s stated concentration of power concerns.

We identified an actionable path to such a treaty that we believe can succeed and best appeal to Trump:

1. A Bilateral-first AI Treaty. An initial US-China emergency treaty/deal to adequately mitigate the full set of imminent AI risks in the cyber, biological/chemical, and nuclear domains — with possible enforcement-suspension for some extreme risks assessed as too-uncertain at this stage, such as loss-of-control via recursive self-improvement.

   1. Framed as the "cooperation of statesmen" that Trump's OSTP director called for at the UN Security Council. Not a UN treaty-making process, which Trump rightly distrusts, but the bilateral-first approach Secretary of War Stimson proposed to Truman in September 1945 for nuclear technologies. Such a deal may freeze the operational enforcement of some catastrophic yet too-uncertain risks. While China has so far called for a UN-based process while advancing a Shanghai-based new AI international institution, it is promising that, as it calls for nuclear disarmament it recognizes that “the two nuclear weapon States with the largest nuclear arsenals should take the lead in nuclear disarmament”.

   2. The deal will also frame and jump-start a treaty-making process for a permanent global AI treaty to ensure sufficient global compliance by middle powers and AI power and wealth sharing — preferably based on the constitutional convention model to sideline vetoes and ensure timelines, but adjusted to GDP to future-proof US and China leadership.

2. Treaty-enforced Citizens' Co-ownership of leading AI and robotics firms. A concurrent US domestic policy — building on Trump's February 2025 US Sovereign Wealth Fund and November 2025 Genesis Mission — locking in citizens' fair and durable sharing of the wealth and power AI creates. Already loudly called for by US voters, MAGA leaders, OpenAI (Altman), Anthropic (Amodei), One Project, The Human Movement, and even AI-lab investors fearing social unrest. A 50% ownership of AI labs was called by Bannon and by Sanders in the span of a few days. Durability requires treaty-enforcement — making compliance a condition of AI-lab licensing so no future US administration or rival jurisdiction can quietly unwind it.

The treaty would require every signatory — including China — to guarantee its own citizens a meaningful ownership stake in its leading AI and robotics firms, by means each nation designs for itself. In the United States: direct citizens’ equity via an expanded Sovereign Wealth Fund and Genesis Mission. In China, the National Social Security Fund, China Investment Corporation, and provincial citizen-benefit vehicles already hold significant SOE equity and can be extended to AI champions. This is not global licensing of private industry — it is a mutual floor of citizen ownership, sovereignly implemented."

Pursuing this or similar plans, Trump has a chance to future-proof US economic leadership, prevent Chinese dominance, avoid immense risks to his life and his family, and achieve unparalleled prestige and legacy as a statesman.

Our mission is to help a critical mass of these potential influencers come together, by helping them deepen their resolve, provide actionable pathways. We aim to facilitate their convergence towards a shared pitch to Trump.

We execute via direct outreach towards them,their relevant staff, advisors and envoys, and introducers to them. Key means are our December 2025, 356-page Strategic Memo (v2.6) for President Trump, and a May 12th, 2026, Open Letter to President Trump (as published) — as well as a closed-door roundtable in Washington DC this September 15-16, 2026 (draft event page). and a 400-word Appeal to President Trump (draft).

Our Existential Predicament with AI

An immense consolidation of wealth and influence is currently converging into a few ultra-billionaires, threatening to politically and economically marginalize the vast majority of the population.

At the same time, the overt and unchecked pursuit of Superintelligence is steering human civilization toward a critical three-way fork:

• (1) an irreversible loss of sovereignty to AI,

• (2) a permanent state of global authoritarianism controlled by an elite few, or

• (3) a successful future secured by prompt, equitable, and secure AI oversight. Intermediate results are deemed highly improbable.

Little recognition has gone into the fact that neither can win such a race—one bound to end in a nuclear conflict or loss of human control over AI. Furthermore, the safety concerns and the need for international agreements to tackle them have also been largely ignored.

Not Just Any Treaty and Treaty-Making Process

A bad treaty-making process would be worse than none, and perceived so by most of those key potential influencers. Persuading a critical mass of them to decisively act and pitch Trump requires a treaty-making process that is very well thought out.

Many AI leaders increasingly think that an ASI gamble may be less risky than a treaty that results in an authoritarian dystopia or completely forecloses the astounding prospects of flourishing for humans and sentient beings.

Therefore, the treaty-making process must be designed to durably prevent ASI and serious misuse, lessen the concentration of power and wealth worldwide, and sustainably leave room for future flourishing, autonomy, and private innovation. This is under the guiding principles of an open but cautious humanism.

It must also be comprehensive in scope from inception: the verification architecture needed for any one catastrophic AI risk is roughly the same as for all of them, so artificial narrowing trades real safety value for illusory political simplicity.

In our Strategic Memo v2.6 (pp. 124-139), we detail how and why a US-China-led treaty (while led by two "strong executive" leaders and requiring extensive surveillance to reliably prevent ASI) can be made to substantially reduce concentration of power — and why It is most likely to do so given certain inherent foreseeable dynamics.

Historical Precedents

In late 1945 and early 1946, a pragmatic US president, Harry Truman, was progressively led by a few key advisors to present to the United Nations what remains by far history's boldest treaty proposal: the Baruch Plan for the international control of nuclear weapons and energy.

The historical parallels with today’s predicament with AI are striking: ever-louder warnings from most top scientists and AI lab leaders, plummeting presidential approval ratings, and mounting concerns and calls for a treaty by a large majority of US voters. Remarkably, the Plan was presented on Donald Trump's within one hour from the birth, June 14th, 1946, perhaps a sign of destiny.

Many scholars agree that if the US had sought an agreement first with the Soviets, and not with its Western allies, the Plan could have succeeded. This bilateral-first approach, pioneered by Niels Bohr in 1944, was championed in the September 1945 proposal of Secretary of War Stimson. Backed by former VP Henry Wallace and Deputy Secretary of State Dean Acheson, it was still not enough to convince Truman.

If a critical mass of key potential influencers of Trump's AI policy rises to history's calling and learns from Truman's mistakes, Trump could co-lead with Xi such a global AI treaty.

In doing so, Trump would contain China, future-proof US economic leadership, and prevent catastrophic risks that would spare no one. Trump would succeed where Truman failed and secure an unparalleled legacy.

Another positive example is the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Created in 1997 and ratified by 193 nations, the OPCW has succeeded in durably restraining the large-scale research, production, and use of chemical weapons, preventing large-scale accidents or misuse to date.

Beyond Safety and Leadership: Ensuring All Americans Benefit from and Control AI

While succeeding in a proper and timely US-China-led treaty would deliver immense peace and safety to Americans, it would not, by itself, do anything to guarantee that all Americans, not just a few coastal billionaires, share in the wealth and power AI creates.

More and more business and political leaders are proposing radical solutions in the form of European-style AI wealth redistributive schemes. Many have been calling for a Universal Baic Income. 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 have succeeded across the political spectrum: the Alaska Permanent Fund, Reagan's Employee Stock Ownership Plans, Margaret Thatcher's 1980s privatizations, Norway's Government Pension Fund Global, Singapore's Temasek.

it can be a natural evolution of Trump’s 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.

In April OpenAI proposed a “public wealth fund that provides every citizen — including those not invested in financial markets — with a stake in A.I.-driven economic growth.” while Anthropic's own CEO has endorsed last October "national sovereign wealth funds with stakes in AI".

Sam Altman has argued for variants of citizen AI co-ownership for years, and last May came out strong against Universal Basic Income as not enough to give power and agency to people. Bannon, Beck, and the emerging Human Movement have made citizen co-ownership of AI labs MAGA-coded.

On May 29th, Steve Bannon proposed that 50% of the stocks of AI firms should accrue to American citizens, individually, in return for a federal financial guarantee (“back stop”). On June 1st, Sanders proposed to accrue 50% of the stock of large AI firms in a new US Sovereign Wealth Fund. Not coincidentally, on the same day, Sam Altman spoke out for the first time against Universal Basic Income as insufficient to preserve citizens' dignity and agency.

Yet, to make this terms really durable and non-repealable, the AI treaty 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. Xi Jinping's Common Prosperity (共同富裕) agenda and the post-2020 reining-in of Chinese tech billionaires. The political instinct is the same on both sides of the Pacific: a runaway tech oligarchy is a threat to any sitting head of state.

No future U.S. administration could quietly unwind it. 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.

Who We Are

The Coalition comprises 10 international NGOs and 20+ exceptional advisors, including former staff from the UN, National Security Agency, World Economic Forum, UBS, Yale, and Princeton, plus 24 contributors to its 356-page Strategic Memo for the Deal of the Century (v2.6). The Coalition launched in July 2024 and was seed-funded by Jaan Tallinn's Survival and Flourishing Fund in February 2025.

What We've Built So Far (May 2026)

Since our seed funding in February 2025, we have deeply researched key potential influencers of Trump’s AI policy and executed a targeted persuasion campaign towards them (and their advisors, staff, and introducers to them) with the purpose of swaying Trump on purely pragmatic terms. Our work consisted of two main activities:

(1) Developed an evolving 356-page Strategic Memo of the Deal of the Century.. 

• The memo contains detailed analysis of treaty-making pathways, enforcement mechanisms, and convergence scenarios, and over 150 pages of deeply researched "persuasion profiles" of each key potential influencer of Trump's AI policy (their interests, philosophies, psychology, and key AI predictions),

• Targeted influencers include — in revised order following our Q2 2026 pivot — Rubio, Gabbard, Bannon, and DeSantis (Catholic/conservative humanists); Carlson and Rogan (humans-first media); Altman, Amodei, Hassabis, Suleyman, and Sutskever (humans-first techno-humanists); with Pope Leo XIV and Vance now secondary; and trans/post-humanists (Musk, Thiel) and administration officials (Kratsios, Sacks, Helberg) tracked as structural constraints."

(2) Engaged selected key potential influencers of Trump's AI policy

• So far, we have engaged 85+ relevant staff and advisors of influencers in SF and DC, held group private dinners in SF and DC, engaged 23+ AI lab officials directly and 28+ DC-based AI safety experts. In three cases (Dario Amodei, Pope Leo XIV, Marco Rubio), the engagement was with officials or advisors one step removed from the influencers.

• Since Q4 2025, we reached out and engaged with them (and their advisors, staff, and introducers to them) directly or through our network, via email and via a three-week October 2025 Persuasion Tour in DC and the Bay Area.

• In Q1 2026, counting on a potential key role for a Pope-Vance alignment following Vance’s deferment to the Pope on AI ethics and safety, we engaged extensively with Vatican AI leaders. We gathered much interest around a June 2026 Roundtable in Rome with exceptional participants. However — due to Thiel’s March 2026 lectures in Rome depicting anyone fostering a treaty to prevent ASI as an Antichrist and a brutal clash between Trump, Vance and the Pope on the war in Iran — the “Caesar-Popist fusion” feared by Thiel has been successfully averted (or pre-empted). Hence, we decided to refocus away from the Pope and Vance as targets, for now, and merge our planned June Rome event with one being planned in Washington DC in September 2026 with several US and DC-based local co-hosting NGOs. 

A Treaty-Making Process That Can Succeed

Should such an alliance succeed in convincing Trump, negotiations would start during one of his four 2026 meetings with Xi, starting this May. Once Trump and Xi are committed to a process we foresee that a nation felt as neutral equally by China and the US, such as Singapore, and its president's uniquely forceful statements about global AI coordination.

PHASE 1. Trump’s and Xi’s initial emergency treaty and framing.

In our vision, Trump and Xi should start by fast-tracking a temporary, emergency bilateral treaty covering, as a single bundle, the full set of imminent dual-use AI risks: AI-augmented biological and chemical threats, AI integration into nuclear command, AI-enabled cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, large-scale manipulation, and the prevention of loss-of-control pathways such as recursive self-improvement, self-replication, and uninterpretable autonomous reasoning.

Tackling these one at a time is not meaningfully easier than tackling them together. The reciprocal verification machinery — compute thresholds, model evaluation protocols, training-run audits, third-party inspection of AI facilities — is the same regardless of which risk category it serves. Once that architecture exists, extending its scope is a marginal cost. A cyber-only or bio-only deal would carry roughly 85% of the implementation burden of a full dual-use treaty while delivering perhaps 30–50% of the risk reduction. The dominant cost — political activation of Trump and Xi on any reciprocal AI verification regime — is paid once.

For risks where the underlying science remains genuinely contested (e.g., the precise capability threshold at which recursive self-improvement becomes irreversible, or the conditions under which alignment-faking becomes detectable), the treaty will include suspended provisions: binding terms whose enforcement triggers activate only once a joint US-China-led scientific assessment panel determines, by supermajority, that the risk is ripe to be regulated. This converts scientific uncertainty from a reason to defer governance into a structured pathway for governance to keep pace with capability.

Concurrently, they should launch a "global AI Apollo Program" to jointly build, at wartime speed, a mutually-trusted socio-technical infrastructure for ultra-high-bandwidth diplomatic communications and trustworthy treaty enforcement mechanisms that ensure accountability, subsidiarity, and checks and balances.

PHASE 2. Expanding to ensure compliance with safety bans.

Midway through Phase 1, the US and China will negotiate with most middle powers the scope and rules of a global treaty-making process for AI based on the constitutional convention model. This model—inspired by the 1787 US Constitutional Convention, as suggested by Sam Altman in 2023—is the only one that can prevent the fatal use of the veto, succeed in delivering an extremely wide-scoped and fair treaty in short and predictable times, and ensure resilient subsidiarity terms. The model will be amended to be realistic: voting will initially be weighted by GDP to secure and future-proof US and China leadership, while still preventing a global duopoly.

Substantial functional roles should be granted to world religious traditions, security agencies, top AI labs, independent AI scientists, and citizen assemblies to ensure the necessary moral authority, scientific knowledge, operational expertise, and democratic legitimacy the scope of this treaty demands.

Towards a Humans-First Humanist AI Alliance

Given the prevalence of secular or Judeo-Christian humanism among MAGA opinion leaders, US voters, and most of the key potential influencers of Trump's AI policy, a humans-first Humanist AI Alliance among a critical mass of those influencers.

In the next 6 months, through closed-door meetings, we will contribute to the emergence of such an alliance, which will develop a successful pitch for Trump that: (1) demonstrates vast practical benefits for Trump and US voters and (2) establishes a set of minimal core ethical principles underlying the scope and methods of a global AI treaty-making process.

The alliance's ethical framework will be developed through an open, non-doctrinal, dialectical approach, grounded in human dignity while engaging in honest dialogue with moderate transhumanist aspirations for human flourishing through technology. This is designed to win the hearts of influential Silicon Valley techno-optimist humanists and outcompete the growing hardcore accelerationist post-humanist camp.

These principles will be conceived from the start to integrate the perspectives of other key global stakeholders: Chinese leadership, middle powers, and most of humanity during the treaty-making process

Roadmap (Je 2026 - June 2027)

• Follow up with and reach out to key potential influencers, their advisors and staff, and their introducers.

• Draft or update documents:

  • The Appeal to DJT (draft), Open Letter to DJT (published v.1), and Strategic Memo for DJT (3.0).

  • Open or Direct Letters from key potential influencers.

  • An Internal Strategy Plan to share with members, partners, and advisors.

• Hold closed-door meetings in Washington, DC and in SF, according to budget, including:

  • The September 15-16, 2026 Roundtable in Washington, DC, titled “The Cooperation of Statesmen” (draft gdoc of event web page). It is framed to attract suitable US officials, State Department, National Security think tanks, and humans-first/pro-human advocates.

• Reach out directly to White House officials and the Office of the President.

• Move the Coalition and its director from Rome to Washington, DC, due to reduced emphasis on the Vatican, and increased focus on DC-based figures.

Operation Capacity & Funding

We have achieved all of this with minimal funding, operating at ~$7,500/month, with one full-time staff member and 20+ volunteers. Now we need to switch gears. If we can make 2-3 AI-skilled junior hires, we can easily transform our 356-page treasure trove of tailored intelligence and our overflow of open influencer pathways into a highly-tailored, high-bandwidth, targeted persuasion campaign and successful convergence meetings in SF and DC. This will enable us to 10x our impact in just months.

With only $95,000, we were able to activate 2,100 hours of professional pro-bono work and achieve astounding results in 2025. We are now seeking $100,000–$400,000 to move to the next stage (and an urgent $10–30k in bridge funding). We are also looking to diversify our funding sources with some more aligned with our humans-first humanist AI focus. Every dollar goes directly to the mission—no fancy offices, no high staff costs. We operate at ~$7,500/month, a fraction of a typical DC policy NGO. (See Donate or Funding So Far