In brief
- Donald Trump said leading AI companies had signed a "morally binding" pact to self-regulate and improve safeguards.
- Tech leaders backed stronger oversight measures, but debate over AI risks and regulation remained unresolved.
United States President Donald Trump says the tech executives who gathered at the White House on Wednesday to discuss regulating AI had signed a "morally binding" commitment to build adequate safeguards for the fast-moving technology.
"They're going to police themselves," Trump said after the meeting that gathered the top leaders in artificial intelligence, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang, OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei.
Trump said the tech bosses had signed a deal that would put on paper their commitment to self-regulate in a morally binding agreement that would not be legally enforceable.
But the final document, dubbed the White House Accord, left the door open "to codify these steps into laws or regulations" if it made sense over time.
Speaking to reporters outside the Oval Office surrounded by the world's most powerful tech bosses, Trump also confirmed that he would officially rename the technology "super intelligence" instead of artificial intelligence "because it's not artificial".
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Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the accord aims to assure customers that AI technology "works in the way that we intend".
The commitment includes "robust internal controls" and multiple layers of auditing — from internal risk reviews to external auditors and oversight from the companies' boards of directors, he said.
Zuckerberg called it a starting point for industry-wide standards.
Elon Musk said the executives essentially agreed to "grading each other's homework, which is a lot better than if people just grade their own homework, for obvious reasons".
The lunch meeting also included Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai of Google.
Of the 31 guests, two were women: Susie Wiles, Donald Trump's chief of staff, and Lisa Su, CEO of semiconductor company AMD.
The gathering occurred as attitudes toward AI sour in Washington DC, with politicians increasingly under pressure from voters to curb or slow AI development over fears it could displace workers and upend society.
Those concerns gained force from a run of incidents in which OpenAI's autonomous systems slipped out of their constraints, starting with a July breach of Hugging Face — a widely used platform for sharing AI models.
OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it was cancelling the release of its latest model, known as Astra 6.1, after internal testing by the ChatGPT-maker revealed it did not meet safety standards.
Trump, advised by Huang and his former AI czar David Sacks, has urged unfettered AI development to outpace China and fuel a US economy increasingly dependent on AI-driven growth.
The issue of data centres, the vast computing facilities the technology requires, has emerged as a flashpoint in midterm election races in both parties, with more and more communities worried about rising electricity bills and the strain on water and land.
Trump has dismissed opponents of these data centres and, after the meeting, insisted that AI companies "will be very generous" with communities who open their doors to them.
"They'll help with their schools, they'll help with their teachers," he said.
'Still under discussion'
Major AI companies, particularly Anthropic and OpenAI, have issued stark public warnings about uncontrolled development of increasingly powerful systems — even as they develop and deploy this same state-of-the-art technology.
Those concerns intensified after a former employee of both companies went public with warnings that the industry is moving faster than safety reviews allow.
Anthropic warned investors of potential existential risks to humanity in the prospectus for its highly anticipated initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.
Anthropic is aiming for an IPO as early as November.
Trump has repeatedly characterised these warnings about existential risks as overblown, and the White House has bitterly clashed with Anthropic over AI safety.
"As the president has said, whoever wins AI, wins. I think that's very important," Amodei said after the meeting. "But I think the technology has very real risks, and the mechanism, how we address those risks, is still under discussion."
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