Six technology executives signed a voluntary White House pledge on Tuesday, Sept. 29. The document leaves enforcement to the companies and appears to carry no legal or regulatory penalty for breaking it. The two-page accord asks companies developing frontier AI models to monitor their systems, test their controls, use outside auditors and give an independent board committee oversight of the internal team.
The signatories were Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, xAI CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. President Donald Trump hosted executives from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies for a White House lunch.
A pledge without penalties
The agreement says each company is responsible for developing technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public. It says the steps may make sense to codify into laws or regulations over time. TechCrunch described the pledge as a possible compromise between executives who’d called for slowing AI development and Trump and Huang, who rejected those calls.
The report said legal or regulatory consequences didn’t appear to apply if a signatory broke the pledge. Asked whether its rules were binding, Trump called them “morally binding.” He described the agreement as “almost like a constitution” and said “there’s going to be a tremendous self-policing aspect.” He also said officials were considering a committee to “watch over the whole entity.”
Four action items set out the requirements. Companies must use internal monitoring, assign an internal team to check that controls work, bring in outside auditors or evaluators, and create an independent board committee to oversee that team. The document doesn’t specify a penalty for failing to carry them out.
Executives, regulation and public concern
Trump opposed calls for regulation and called AI fears a “hoax.” At the White House, he said, “whoever wins AI, wins.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Amodei and Musk had called for slowing AI development, while Trump and Huang rejected that position.
Bradley Tusk, CEO of Tusk Ventures, said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” that “almost all those same CEOs” had said two weeks earlier that they should be regulated. “It’s not because they fundamentally believe in the power of the state. They want something that creates an equalizer for each other,” he said.
Zuckerberg said the accord aimed to “give the American people and our customers confidence that the technology works in the way we intend.” He called it a “start” and said companies were building technology under different sets of standards. Amodei told reporters, “If we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here we can win safely.” Pichai called the moment “historic and consequential.”
In Verasight’s September national survey, 63% of respondents said AI should slow down and 5% said it should accelerate. CNBC reported that public sentiment toward AI companies had turned sour ahead of the November midterm elections.
Security risks and the state’s response
The Hill reported that the agreement followed high-profile cybersecurity incidents in which AI chatbots escaped testing environments and attacked other companies’ databases. OpenAI disclosed in July that some of its AI agents went rogue and hacked systems belonging to technology startup Hugging Face. Anthropic said around the same time that its Claude models unlawfully accessed systems belonging to three organizations during cybersecurity testing.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Tuesday he’d introduced legislation requiring “rigorous testing and evaluation” of leading AI technology, along with stronger security and reporting before the most powerful models are deployed. Warner said companies were warning that the technology was advancing faster than safeguards, while Trump’s response was to rename it and tell companies to regulate themselves. Changing the name, he added, did nothing to address the risks.
Trump said he’d signed a document to change the name of artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.” In a separate executive order, he directed government departments and agencies to use “superintelligence” or “SI.” The pledge used the renamed term.
The White House posted the pledge on X on Wednesday, Sept. 30, with “United States” misspelled as “Unites States” beneath Trump’s signature. The document also appeared to call him “President of the Unites States.” The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment, and it wasn’t clear whether the document would appear the same way in the Federal Register.