Two of the world's most powerful nations are speaking the same language of AI safety while protecting entirely different things. The United States and China each invoke responsibility, risk, and guardrails — yet one seeks to shield the individual from concentrated power, while the other seeks to shield the state from uncontrolled influence. This is not a technical disagreement awaiting a technical solution; it is a collision of foundational beliefs about how human societies should be ordered. The longer these divergent visions harden into incompatible standards, the more the shared architectur