President Trump called for “tremendous self-regulation” of artificial intelligence Tuesday at a White House lunch with tech billionaires — where they agreed to a “morally binding” set of principles for the technology. As it should be.
Trump hosted nearly two dozen business titans in the East Room before surprising journalists by walking his guests onto the driveway outside the West Wing for a 33-minute impromptu press conference. “There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation,” Trump said during the lunch as he sat between Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on his right and XAI’s Elon Musk and Google’s Sundar Pichai to his left.
“We automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that. But the self-regulation is very important.” At the meal, Trump and six of the CEOs signed a one-page document titled the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.” “It’s almost like a constitution in a way,” Trump told a stunned pack of reporters crowded around him and the group of businessmen on the driveway. “The biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection… I think it’s morally binding.”
The leaders of Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and XAI signed alongside Trump. The accord commits the firms to “four layers” of safeguards, including establishing internal controls to monitor risks to “cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.” Companies will then designate internal teams to track compliance. External auditors will conduct independent reviews, with a committee of each company’s board of directors in charge of “ensur[ing] any issues identified are remediated.”
The six companies “will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems,” the document says, adding, “Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” Zuckerberg said the agreement would yield “multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review, external auditors and evaluators, and agreeing that we’re going to have all of our boards of directors independently review the reports that come from the auditors.”
“The idea isn’t that this is the only thing that we will ever do. It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to,” Zuckerberg said. Huang, whom Trump called a “very handsome guy,” said that AI was essential to economic growth and had created about a million jobs in the US.