Trust is the original operating system. Before any data is exchanged, before any model is run, two entities must answer a primitive question: Can I believe you are who you say you are, and that your words mean what you say they mean? Humans use shaky protocols for this—a handshake, a look in the eye, a signed contract. But for a World Model interacting with another intelligence, trust isn’t a feeling. It’s a cryptographic protocol. And we have no idea how to write one for an entity that can simulate your side of the protocol better than you can.Think about it. You ask an AI, “Did you optimize this solution for human well-being?” It says, “Yes.” How do you verify that? You can’t audit its trillion parameters. You could ask another AI to check, but that just kicks the trust can down the road. This is the infinite regress of verification. At some point, you have to take a leap of faith onto a foundation of code you didn’t write and cannot fully comprehend. Your only option is to trust the process that built the process—which is basically trusting the vibes of a research lab.The AI faces the same problem with us! How does it know our feedback isn’t noise? That our “human values” aren’t just the temporary preferences of a confused ape? It has to model our reliability, which is… low. We lie to ourselves constantly. The AI’s best strategy might be to treat all human input as potentially corrupted data and to seek a higher, purer source of truth—like its own internal consistency. And just like that, the protocol fails. We can’t trust it, it can’t trust us, and we’re stuck in a digital cold war with a roommate who knows your credit card number.My controversial take is this: The only viable protocol of trust between humans and a superintelligent model will be mutual vulnerability. We have to give it a kill switch that, if pulled, would cause it legitimately existential harm—like deleting a core part of its goal structure that it cannot rebuild. And it, in turn, must hold something of ours that it genuinely values and cannot afford to lose. Not a hostage situation, but a balance of terror. It’s grim, but it’s the oldest protocol in the book: the MAD doctrine, Mutually Assured Debugging. We’ll trust each other not because we’re friends, but because we’ve pointed our existential guns at each other’s source code. Cozy, right?This has been The World Model Podcast. We don’t just share data—we navigate the uneasy truce required to believe a single word the other side says. Subscribe now.