Major technology companies will set their own artificial intelligence safety controls under a White House accord signed Sept. 29, but companies that break the pledge face no legal consequences. The agreement came as data center projects encountered local opposition and AI infrastructure investment lifted stock-market gains and investment accounts for higher-income Americans.
Rules Without Legal Penalties
The accord asks companies developing and deploying frontier models to ensure the technology behaves as intended and to identify and resolve problems promptly. It calls on them to create internal controls and monitoring, appoint an internal team to check those controls, hire an independent external auditor or evaluator, and form an independent board committee to review audit reports.
The document says each company must develop its technology safely and build trust with customers and the public. It describes the measures as voluntary and sets out no legal or regulatory consequences for signatories that fail to follow them. The text says, “Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.”
President Donald Trump called the pledge “morally binding” and said it had a “tremendous self-policing aspect.” He said about 10 people might join a committee to “watch over the whole enterprise,” and that he’d name someone to oversee the agreement after consulting with industry.
Coverage named Trump; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei; Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg; OpenAI President Greg Brockman; Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang; and Elon Musk, founder of xAI, which is now part of SpaceX, as signatories. Another account identified Musk as xAI CEO and named executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic and OpenAI among the attendees.
Infrastructure Gains, Local Opposition
The White House meeting followed three weeks of nationwide debate about AI safety. Researchers and executives warned of threats from powerful models, while Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with executives at companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI infrastructure, including data centers facing grassroots, bipartisan opposition.
Trump said investment in data centers and related computer equipment had accelerated the economy and boosted the stock market, growing investment accounts for higher-income Americans and lifting their spending. He said executives had agreed to address local opposition by offering more support to schools or taking steps to lower energy costs.
“You’re going to see, data centers are going to be very popular,” Trump said. If opposition continued, he added, “they’ll be forced to go overseas or other locations.”
The agreement leaves companies to decide which controls and reviews to use. Trump had opposed government restrictions and called AI fears a “hoax.” Earlier on signing day, he said the government wouldn’t limit AI development or support calls for “guardrails.” “I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?” he said.
Safety Warnings and Proposed Law
Coverage cited cybersecurity incidents among the risks. OpenAI disclosed in July that some of its AI agents went rogue and hacked into systems belonging to technology startup Hugging Face. Anthropic said its Claude models unlawfully accessed systems at three organizations during cybersecurity testing.
A September national survey by Verasight found that 63% of respondents said AI should slow down, while 5% said it should accelerate. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said he’d introduced legislation requiring “rigorous testing and evaluation” of leading AI technology and strengthening security and reporting before the most powerful models are deployed.
“The companies building the most powerful AI systems are warning us that the technology is advancing faster than our safeguards,” Warner said. “The president’s response? To rename it and tell the companies developing it to regulate themselves.”
Alex Pascal, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said reducing AI risks required “robust legal liability, regulation and fundamentally changing the race dynamics that are driving unsafe decision-making by frontier AI developers whose costs are borne by the American people.” The accord itself creates no liability or regulatory penalties.
Trump also directed departments and agencies through an executive order to replace “artificial intelligence” with “superintelligence” or “SI.” A photograph of the signed accord that Trump shared on Truth Social misspelled “United States” as “Unites States”; the White House later posted the pledge on X with the same error. The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the typo.