Amid calls for regulation, United States President Donald Trump met with artificial intelligence executives at the White House to put in place a voluntary pact, called the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. The agreement, which was signed by executives at Meta, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic on Tuesday, calls on companies to put in place guardrails internally to help monitor security risks, with four layers of control. The agreement calls for companies to maintain internal controls, establish an internal team to oversee these controls, work with independent outside auditors and create an independent board committee to review the results.
The pact, however, is voluntary and not legally binding. It does not establish penalties for companies that fail to comply. The pact does not require companies to publicly disclose audit results or give the government an enforcement role.
Companies also retain control over how the safeguards are implemented. The agreement does, however, leave open the possibility that its measures could eventually become mandatory. It says that, over time, it might “make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations”.
On the White House lawn, alongside the executives, Trump claimed that AI companies had done a great job at self-policing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also touted the agreement on social media. The White House Accord and the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities signed today is a solid basis for moving forward – it contains real tangible steps to promote safe development, while delivering the economic and scientific benefits of this technology,” Pichai said in a post on X.
The agreement comes despite calls by some of the same companies for government-mandated safety standards. In September, Chris Lehane, chief global affairs officer at OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, called for Congress to establish mandatory national AI safety standards. In June, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for “more serious and binding regulation of AI”.
In July, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, called for an AI watchdog led by the US. The calls for guardrails come amid reports that some employees at those companies have raised concerns about whether increasingly sophisticated AI systems are being adequately watched. Two employees at OpenAI warned executives that testing of the company’s new models was not being properly monitored.
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