The optics were, frankly, horrifying.

It wasn't even noon at the Global AI Safety Summit when the buttons started flying. We were supposed to be talking about guardrails, compute thresholds, and the $1.2 billion "sovereign cloud" project that’s currently hemorrhaging taxpayer money into the pockets of three guys in a garage in Palo Alto. Instead, we got three members of the Congress party standing on velvet-cushioned chairs, peeling off their shirts like they were at a cut-rate bachelor party.

Chest hair and policy papers. Not a mix anyone asked for.

The goal, apparently, was to protest the "hidden" nature of the government’s new algorithmic transparency bill. "If the AI won't show us its code, we'll show the world our skin," shouted one representative, who looked like he hadn't seen a gym since the Clinton administration. It was a stunt designed for a viral clip. It worked, but for all the wrong reasons. By the time the security detail bundled them out of the plenary hall, the internet had already turned them into a series of deeply unflattering memes involving "Low-Resolution Intelligence."

The backlash was instant. The opposition parties, rarely known for their own dignity, smelled blood. By mid-afternoon, a joint statement described the display as a stain on the national character. "They made us all feel ashamed," the lead opposition spokesperson told a scrum of reporters outside the hall. "We are here to discuss the existential threat of sentient code, and the governing party is treating the venue like a locker room. It’s a joke. A bad, sweaty joke."

It is a joke. But it’s one with a $450 million price tag attached to the specific procurement contract they were ostensibly protesting.

While the shirtless trio was making everyone lose their appetite, the real tragedy was happening on the main stage. The summit was meant to address the "Black Box" problem—the fact that the government is about to automate the approval process for small-business loans using a model no one can actually explain. The trade-off is simple and ugly: speed for accountability. If you’re a baker trying to get a loan to fix a cooling unit and the machine says no, there’s no human to yell at. There’s just a prompt.

Instead of debating the ethics of outsourcing the middle class’s survival to a proprietary math equation, we spent four hours talking about whether or not it’s appropriate to see a legislator’s collarbone.

This is how tech policy dies. It doesn't die in a high-minded debate about the future of humanity. It dies in a circus. The Congress party claims they were driven to "extreme measures" because their questions about the data-scraping provisions in the new bill were ignored. Maybe they were. But walking into a room full of international delegates and tech CEOs and stripping down doesn’t demand answers. It just makes the people with the answers stop taking you seriously.

One CEO from a major chip manufacturer was seen staring at the spectacle with a look of profound, weary detachment. He didn't look offended. He looked like a man who just realized he could probably get away with charging the government double for his next batch of H100s because the people writing the checks are clearly not home in the head.

The opposition's "shame" is mostly performative, of course. They’re just annoyed they didn't think of a way to hijack the news cycle first. But their point about the gravity of the event stands. We are currently watching the largest transfer of decision-making power from humans to software in the history of the species. We’re talking about the end of the "landscape" of traditional labor—sorry, I mean the end of actual jobs for actual people.

And yet, the level of discourse in the room was lower than a Reddit thread on a Tuesday morning.

The summit was supposed to be a moment of reckoning for a country trying to pretend it’s a tech superpower. Instead, it looked like a failed audition for a reality show. The $1.2 billion cloud project is still a mess. The loan algorithms are still opaque. The privacy protections are still non-existent. But hey, at least we know what the representative from the third district looks like without a tie.

After the "shirtless three" were escorted out, the session resumed. A panelist from a think tank tried to bring the conversation back to data sovereignty and the cost-benefit analysis of local LLM hosting. Nobody listened. The journalists in the back were too busy refreshing their feeds to see if the "Ashamed" hashtag was still trending higher than the actual news of the $450 million hardware grift.

Is this really what we’re doing? We’re building god-like machines while the people in charge of the kill switch can’t even manage to keep their clothes on during a keynote.

If this is the vanguard of our defense against the machines, I’m starting to root for the machines. They might be biased and hallucinate half the time, but at least they have the decency to stay in their boxes.

Who knew that the most transparent thing about the AI Summit would be a bunch of politicians’ torsos?