Connie, a screenwriter and director from Calgary, Canada, brought a question to the second "Ask the Mates Anything" episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. She was looking for a problem that would still be hard after so much else had been solved, and she kept returning to distrust between rival nations. The episode was published on September 22, 2026.
She said she had become more optimistic about the future while writing a project for an XPRIZE competition. She had also recently read Solve Everything, a public essay by Alexander Wissner-Gross and Peter Diamandis. In it, the authors argue that when cognition becomes abundant, scarcity shifts toward things like purpose, agreement and safety. Connie took that idea further. If agreement is becoming scarce, could reaching agreement between distrustful rivals become "compute bound": a problem limited mainly by computing power? Could coordination between the United States and China become an engineering problem?
Her proposal went like this. She expected "sovereign AIs", meaning AI systems run by or for a particular state, to advise governments more and more. Could those systems connect to a shared protocol and use privacy-preserving computation to search for gradually improving agreements, without either side revealing protected data? She asked whether that was a meaningful direction, technically and institutionally, and what should be solved first.
What private computation can do
The technique behind her question is secure multi-party computation, usually shortened to MPC. A textbook by David Evans, Vladimir Kolesnikov and Mike Rosulek describes it as a way for several parties to calculate something together from inputs that each of them keeps private. In the textbook's auction example, participants can learn who won and at what price without everyone's bids being revealed. The technique has also been used outside the laboratory. In Denmark, it helped set prices for sugar-beet contracts, with the computation split among representatives of the sugar processor, the farmers and researchers.
Connie's question applies that idea to diplomacy. Each side would contribute information it wants to protect, and only the agreed result would be revealed.
The privacy guarantees come with conditions. The textbook explains that different protocols protect against different threats. Some assume participants follow the rules and only try to learn from the messages they see. Others still hold when participants actively cheat. The guarantees also depend on how many participants might secretly work together. Real deployments raise two more questions: whether the software actually does what it claims, and exactly which result the computation is allowed to reveal.
Wissner-Gross's "hot take"
Peter Diamandis, the show's host, passed the question to Alexander Wissner-Gross, a computer scientist and the founder of Reified. He offered what he called "a hot take."
He agreed that multi-party computation is "a very fashionable problem in computer science right now." It lets several parties collaborate, share data, reach convergence and mediate "in a zero-trust way", meaning without having to trust each other. But he did not think it was the limiting factor for international peace. If the goal is to avoid a second Cold War between the United States and China, he said, "I don't actually think that the solution looks algorithmic in nature."
Instead, he said, the solution "probably looks more geopolitical infrastructural." He gave two examples: solving "the Taiwan issue," and bringing supply chains back home to every country, so that international trade in physical goods could be cut off without a global depression.
His model case was energy. He argued that recent developments in the Middle East happened "in no small part" because fracking had given America energy sovereignty and independence in fossil fuels. He wanted to apply that example more broadly and ask what happens when the United States no longer needs China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan "or any advanced manufacturing at all." "I think it would be a very different world," he said.
He summed up his view in deliberately provocative terms. If the goal is world peace, he said, "as perverse as this sounds," the task is to "obliterate, cook, incinerate" the need for global trade in products and services. "And perversely, I think you get a very peaceful world." He saw no algorithmic component to that, "not to first order." The energy example was the only evidence he offered, and the exchange did not explain how every country would rebuild its supply chains at home.
Two questions inside one
The exchange separates two things that Connie's question had combined. One is the ability to compute privately: whether rival governments could find a mutually acceptable deal without revealing their positions. The textbook shows that this can work in clearly defined settings such as auctions and contract pricing, as long as the protocol's assumptions hold.
The other question is whether governments want an agreement at all, and what they have at stake. Wissner-Gross's answer is aimed at this second question. His remedy does not involve better ways of searching for common ground. It would change the conditions behind the rivalry: settle a flashpoint like Taiwan and reduce dependence to the point where losing trade would no longer mean economic collapse.
An earlier Moonshots guest suggested a different starting point. In an episode published August 18, 2026, technology executive Alvin Wang Graylin proposed that the United States and China begin with confidence-building steps. These included a hotline for sharing information about suspicious attacks. In his framework Beyond Rivalry, he also proposed observing each other's AI safety tests, allowing reciprocal audits and publishing research together. The two men spoke in separate episodes and were not debating each other. Their approaches still point in different directions. Graylin's steps aim to build confidence between two powers that keep dealing with each other. Wissner-Gross's route would shrink the dependence between them.
Neither answer rules out Connie's protocol as a tool. Wissner-Gross's objection is about what to solve first. In his view, the cryptography matters less than the reasons rivals have to fear each other. By his own admission, his route to a more peaceful world is a "perverse" one: countries needing each other less.