Technology and Science30 September, 20262 min read
Donald Trump Says AI Executives Signed Voluntary Safety Agreement At White House
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Trump and major AI leaders signed a voluntary safety pact to self-regulate AI development. The agreement outlines internal and external reviews and independent audits of frontier AI systems.
Voluntary pact at White House
President Donald Trump met with AI and tech executives at the White House on Tuesday and said they signed a voluntary safety agreement that he called “morally binding.” Trump described the meeting as “an extraordinary gathering” of leaders “building America’s Golden Age,” and he said the industry would be “self-policing.”
Timnit Gebru, the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, warned that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture,” while she questioned claims that AI poses an existential risk to humanity. Gebru also said tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.”
Who signed, what they promised
House Speaker Mike Johnson said the accord is “voluntary” for the AI companies and he described it as “a statement of principles” with “expectations” for “oversight and transparency.” Zuckerberg said the agreement was “a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to,” and he said it involved “building multiple layers of auditing and controls.”
The BBC reported that Trump said the pact was “almost like a constitution, in a way,” and the agreement included safeguards to keep models operating as intended and to detect and fix issues. The BBC also quoted Trump saying the accord would involve “independent auditors” and ensure platforms do not “hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.”
Debate over accountability and oversight
Nanyang Technological University AI governance researcher Jose Miguelito Enriquez said the pact shows “emerging consensus” but does not address whether AI developers should be held accountable for incidents. Law professor Kimberlee Weatherall from the University of Sydney said the agreement appears to allow firms to “define what counts as safety” and does not state what consequences there are for any breaches.
Trump said he would set up a board to oversee the safety of AI tools, and he told reporters “I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing.” The BBC said Trump signed an executive order instructing US government departments and agencies to start using the terms “SI” and “Super Intelligence,” and it quoted the order saying the capabilities increasingly represent “a new era of Super Intelligence.”