At the nexus of queer feminist science studies, critical plant studies, and socio-legal studies, my current ethnographic book project, Vegetal AI Ethics, examines ecologies of smart farming technologies, farm workers, apple trees, horticulturalists, government officials, AI policies, and colonial botanical archives as a site for understanding changing South African politics, but also how the vegetal subject and human-plant relations offer a more meaningful approach for governing artificial intelligence (AI) and developing an AI ethics. A central question and basis for the research is, what is smarter the plant or the AI? Rather than a question to be answered, it is an animating guide that enlivens alternative inquiries by centering plants. For example, focusing on plants to examine precision agriculture drone technologies reveals how apple trees are themselves digital disruptors, refusing to grow in straight and tidy rows ideal for digitizing plant life. Additionally, attending to how apple trees engage in complex “intelligent” chemical signaling with other beings offers ways of troubling western scientific and political frameworks (including AI systems) that privilege gendered and racialized logics of reason and rationality as more valuable modes of intelligence and supreme arbiters of Truth. Furthermore, pondering trees as “inventors” reveals how recent patent applications declaring AI machines (e.g. DABUS) as inventors continue to privilege logics of rationality, which are foundational to how western modernity has historically characterized certain humans as more intelligent than others. It is these questions and more that engender a multi-species, vegetal AI ethics for the governing of artificial intelligence.