Artificial Intelligence and the City investigates how accelerating AI deployment is reshaping urban governancegovernance, knowledge production, and everyday life. Building on Demis Hassabis’s warning that society is “not ready” for AGIAGI, I situate cities as primary arenas where readiness is negotiated through the emergence of epistemic communitiesepistemic communities—dense networks of officials, experts, citizens, and machines that practice “knowledge diplomacyknowledge diplomacy.” Tracing the HiroshimaHiroshima G-7 process and other norm-setting efforts, the essay compares three regulatory imaginaries: European rights-based, U.S. market-oriented, and Chinese authoritarian. It distinguishes “smart” cities that harness IoT data for efficiency from “intelligent” cities that allow AI to steer planning, and projects that by 2030 at least half of major urban centers will embed AI in core public functions. Using rhetoricalrhetorical argumentation lenses of topics and loci, I analyze how AI now mediates urban concerns such as mobility, health, waste, environment, and infrastructure while interacting with everyday common-sense judgment. Philosophical traditions—from Aristotle’s protreptic rhetoric to Deweyan pragmatismpragmatism—frame a call for deliberative feedback loops aligning machine inference with human values. Ultimately, the study contends that plural, commonsense-oriented epistemic communities can temper existential risks, bridge North–South digital dividesdigital divide, and steer AI toward truly resilient, more sustainable, humane, culturally inclusive, and globally just urban futures.