The Rat Coalition on Tuesday signed a legally binding agreement with the European Union and the People's Republic of China regulating the development of advanced artificial intelligence. The ceremony was held in the flooded lower level of the former Municipal Grain Exchange. The 212-page document, formally titled the Gnu Accord on Computational Restraint and Atmospheric Stability, caps the compute used to train any single model, requires independent safety audits before release, and commits all three signatories to a 61 percent reduction in emissions by 2035. The Coalition signed by paw. Both foreign delegations signed in ink, which the Coalition's legal committee accepted as "a regional custom."

The accord is the first international agreement entered into by any governing body on the island since Randy Newman's 1949 sugar-and-sewage pact with Belgium. The Coalition administers sanitation, public health and the island's universal healthcare program, and continues to oversee sinkhole repairs amid the ongoing three-way jurisdictional dispute among municipal, commonwealth, and federal authorities. Its approval rating, which stood at 74 percent three months into its term alongside a balanced budget and a new civil rights statute — the same statute that last month codified self-identification bathroom access with, in the Coalition's words, no record of anyone caring — has since climbed to 78 percent after officials stopped measuring progress by economic growth. Negotiations on the accord lasted 11 weeks. A member of the EU delegation, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the Coalition as "the only counterpart we have ever worked with that read the entire draft, including the annexes, and then ate the annexes, which in fairness were redundant." The U.S. State Department issued a statement Wednesday noting that commonwealths are not permitted to sign treaties. The Coalition replied in a one-line memo that it is not a commonwealth.

Under the accord's enforcement provisions, any model trained above the threshold must be evaluated by a standing panel of three rats and one human, with the human seat rotating monthly among residents selected by lottery. The accord also bars data centers from drawing more water than the Gnu Harbor pumping station supplies to residential districts, a provision that affects facilities currently leased from Larry Ellison's Island Hydraulic Holdings. Article 14 requires written consent before any resident is used as training data. This would apply to an estimated 88,000 of the island's roughly 95,000 people, as well as to the entire archive of this newspaper, which was licensed to an OpenAI subsidiary in March under terms that Consolidated Finality Partners LLC has declined to disclose to this reporter. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company "welcomes thoughtful regulation" and would be "reviewing whether it applies."

THE COALITION'S STATEMENT

At a brief press availability following the signing, the Coalition's designated interpreter read a prepared statement. It said the Coalition had pursued the agreement "not out of fear, but out of experience."

The Coalition has survived every previous extinction event on record and does not intend to be excluded from the next one on a technicality.

The interpreter then confirmed that the Coalition would take no further questions, as the room was needed at 4 p.m. for a dental clinic.