The most powerful tech executives in America huddled around a table in the East Room on Tuesday, putting pen to paper on the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence”. Trump described the document, in which the signatories effectively pledge to responsibly develop frontier AI, as "almost like a constitution”. He also praised the industry’s capacity for "tremendous self-policing" and declared the agreement "morally binding”.
You read that right, folks. Morality—a concept that AI is fundamentally unable to conceive and perhaps the last word one might associate with the boardrooms of corporate America—is what we’re using to regulate the development of one of the most transformative and potentially devastating tools the world has ever known. Trump on Tuesday took to Truth Social to share an image of the accord, which bore his signature alongside those of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, xAI founder Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Besides the evidence suggesting Brockman boasts the penmanship of a five-year-old (one assumes AI does all his writing for him), the first thing you might notice is that this "almost constitutional" document contains a grand total of 308 words. Unlike the actual Constitution, which required months of painstaking deliberation by the Founding Fathers and was subject to amendment, this scrap of paper contains nothing but vague platitudes and loose commitments to responsibly develop AI. The signatories say they'll "implement strict controls”, "empower internal teams" and "partner with an independent auditor" to appropriately manage AI development.
Actual legal or regulatory oversight is deferred to a later date—maybe. One could condemn critics of such commitments as cynics…were American history not littered with examples of how corporations willingly and knowingly acted in woefully immoral ways in pursuit of their own interests, and to enrich themselves and their shareholders—usually at the public's expense. Like, for example, when America’s banks sold billions upon billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities stuffed with shoddy loans, only for it all to come crumbling down and trigger a global financial crash in 2008.
Or when Wells Fargo employees forged signatures, created fake PINs and moved customers’ money around to open millions of accounts and products without their consent, all under relentless pressure from management to hit sales targets. The trappings of corporate greed are by no means limited to these United States. Engineers of German automaker Volkswagen literally wrote software that could recognize when a diesel car was being tested for emissions, behave itself until the test was over, then pump out up to 40 times the permitted pollution on the road.
In all of the above cases—and God only knows how many more—these institutions weren’t violating 308-word moral agreements; they were violating actual laws and robust regulations. Corporations and the people who run them don’t care about morality. They want growth, investment, and profit- which brings us to the products of said companies and their executives.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
