What Do AI Risk, Data Centers And Bananas Have In Common?

The banana most Americans eat today isn’t the banana most Americans ate a century ago. I know that seems like a pretty wide departure from artificial intelligence, data centers and the possibility that increasingly capable AI systems might do things we don’t intend. Bear with me.

This week, President Donald Trump and executives from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia agreed to the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” a voluntary framework establishing four layers of controls and audits around frontier AI development. The first stands out. The companies agreed to implement controls and monitoring “around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats,” and to ensure their models do not “hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.” The accord adds expectations around internal monitoring, independent external auditors and board-level oversight, with the possibility that some of these steps could eventually become laws or regulations.

All very reasonable precautions. But they raise another question: What exactly are we granting these extraordinarily capable AI systems access to?

Just this week, I gave ChatGPT access to many parts of my Google identity. I did it because it was useful. I am absolutely not alone. In 2026, AI has moved from something we ask questions, almost like a much more capable search box, to something connected into the fabric of the systems around which we build our work and personal lives.

Many AI risk conversations focus on the models themselves. Can we keep models aligned, recognize when their capabilities take a dangerous turn and trust the companies developing them to maintain control of their own products? Those questions matter. But we aren’t paying anywhere near the same attention to the environment into which these systems are being deployed.

Which brings me back to the banana.

The Banana Problem

From Server Rooms To Hyperscale

Data centers aren’t new. The scale is.