As details from US President Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Big Tech executives emerged on Tuesday, including a pledge on artificial intelligence safety, campaigners and Democrats in Congress continued calling for stronger AI protections.
After the gathering, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform a “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” signed by him, billionaire Elon Musk—a former member of the administration who leads multiple companies—Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman.
The accord came out of a gathering that included the president and other top officials as well as over a dozen tech leaders, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and representatives from Microsoft and Palantir. It states that “every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public.”
The document goes on to detail “four layers of controls and audits” that each company developing AI—or "super intelligence (SI), as Trump directed his administration to call it in a Tuesday executive order—should implement, including robust internal controls to monitor capabilities and alignment, internal teams to ensure safeguards are operating as intended, partnerships with outside auditors, and an independent committee of the board of directors to receive reports on problems and their fixes.
Before Trump released the accord, he addressed the media alongside some officials and executives. Asked if the agreement is binding in any way, the president responded, “I think it’s morally binding.”
Beside him, Zuckerberg—whose company has faced legal issues over its social media platforms—laid out the broad strokes of the accord, which he framed as “a start,” suggesting there is more to come.
Since OpenAI revealed in July that its models autonomously breached the systems of the open-source platform Hugging Face during internal testing, the firm—plus Anthropic, Google, and Meta—has disclosed additional incidents. Axios reported over the weekend that Anthropic and OpenAI alone “are investigating tens of thousands of incidents.”
Experts in the industry and beyond have increasingly expressed concerns, with a United Nations panel stressing in a report about the Hugging Face incident that current AI guardrails are “unraveling,” and one Anthropic researcher quitting earlier this month and warning that the rapidly advancing technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
While some members of Congress have responded by introducing bills aimed at reining in the industry and establishing mandatory safeguards, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—who was part of Tuesday’s meeting—has instead called for voluntary commitments. He’s also dismissed mounting public concerns about AI data centers raising electricity bills, polluting drinking water, and threatening jobs, even suggesting that the grassroots pushback in various communities is “a Chinese psyop.”
The president—whose inauguration was dubbed “a coronation of our country’s descent into oligarchy” because of all the ultrarich attendees, including many of the men at the White House on Tuesday—has also made clear that he opposes a legislative route. According to The Associated Press, Trump said Tuesday that “I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police.”
Progressive US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) responded to the event on social media Tuesday, writing: “Self-regulation? That’s a recipe for disaster.”
Rep. Yvette D. Clarke (D-NY) said that “the American people are deeply concerned on the direction unregulated AI is taking our country, and they deserve transparent answers from the men with their hands on the wheel. Instead, all we get is another closed-door meeting, and more promises made and broken in secret. We cannot say exactly what they schemed, today. But I am certain we’ll see the consequences soon enough.”
Mitch Jones, deputy director of Food & Water Action, a group that has spearheaded fights against superpolluting AI data centers, said that “the notion that a manically profit-driven AI industry will safely regulate itself is as dangerous as it is absurd—akin to claiming an arsonist would make a good firefighter. Trump’s only concern is doing the bidding of his Big Tech billionaire friends.”
“Trump’s rejection of the overwhelming opposition to AI data center construction throughout the country is political incompetence of the highest order,” Jones continued, looking toward the November midterms, which are just five weeks away. “His obstinance will no doubt cost him and his party deeply in the coming elections.”
“We can’t have politicians giving the tech oligarchs free rein,” he argued. “We need political leaders that will decisively rein them in. Our leaders must stand with us and say ‘no’ to so-called super intelligence, and put a halt to the massive hyperscale data centers powering this runaway industry.”
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