President Trump convened top AI executives at the White House on Tuesday and doubled down on his opposition to government intervention, arguing that “self-regulation” is the answer to growing fears about the technology slipping out of human control. After the meeting, he said there was “a lot of commonality in this room” and that he and the CEOs had signed a “morally binding” accord enforced through “self-policing and group policing.”

The one-page document Trump posted on Truth Social calls on each participating company to adopt four safeguards. Executives said these include technological controls to detect problems in new models, internal risk reviews, and external auditors. The accord adds that it “might make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations” later. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg called it “a start,” while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei said the mechanism for addressing risks is “still under discussion” and stressed that the technology still poses “real dangers.”

The accord also formally changed the technology’s name in government record-keeping from AI to “Super Intelligence,” or SI. “We’ve changed the name officially to SI,” Trump said. The White House billed the event as a “meeting and luncheon on Super Intelligence,” and guests included Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Lisa Su, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Jeff Bezos.

The gathering followed alarming disclosures, including reports of thousands of problematic incidents involving AI agents, OpenAI’s cancellation of a model release over safety concerns, and a Florida legal challenge seeking to halt OpenAI’s training of new models without outside safeguards. Trump nonetheless dismissed worries, said AI will make the world safer, and vowed never to “stifle the growth” of a technology he called bigger than the Industrial Revolution.

Supporters of self-regulation argue that industry insiders understand the technology best, can move faster than legislators, and can adapt controls as models evolve, all while preserving US competitiveness globally. The accord’s audits and risk reviews also create a shared baseline. The pitfalls are significant, however. The commitments are voluntary and unenforceable, details remain unsettled, and companies are policing themselves while competing commercially, creating an incentive to prioritize speed over safety. Critics may also see the rebrand as a signal that the technology is more powerful than officials are prepared to oversee, without matching that shift with binding rules.

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Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/article/trump-gathers-with-ai-leaders-floats-self-regulation-as-the-way-to-deal-with-the-technologys-dangers-193745293.html