Trump says AI bosses signed ‘morally binding’ commitment to self-regulate their technology

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks alongside Speaker of the House Mike Johnson after they met with AI executives including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk, CEO of Meta Platforms Mark Zuckerberg, outside the West Wing of the White House on Sept. 29, 2026 Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Article content

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the tech executives gathered at the White House to discuss regulating AI had signed a “morally binding” commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology.

Article content

“They’re going to police themselves,” Trump said after the meeting that gathered the top leaders in artificial intelligence, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.

Article content

Article content

Article content

Trump said the tech bosses had signed a deal that would put on paper their commitment to self-regulate in a morally binding agreement that would not be legally enforceable.

Article content

Article content

But the final document, dubbed the White House Accord, left the door open “to codify these steps into laws or regulations” if it made sense over time.

Article content

Speaking to reporters outside the Oval Office surrounded by the world’s most powerful tech bosses, Trump also confirmed that he would officially rename the technology “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence “because it’s not artificial.”

Article content

Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the accord aims to assure customers that AI technology “works in the way that we intend.”

Article content

The commitment includes “robust internal controls” and multiple layers of auditing — from internal risk reviews to external auditors and oversight from the companies’ boards of directors, he said.

Article content

Zuckerberg called it a starting point for industry-wide standards.

Article content

Elon Musk said the executives essentially agreed to “grading each other’s homework, which is a lot better than if people just grade their own homework for obvious reasons.”

Article content

Article content

The lunch meeting also included Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google.

Article content

Article content

Of the 31 guests, two were women: Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, and Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.

Article content

The gathering occurred as attitudes toward AI sour in Washington, with lawmakers increasingly under pressure from voters to curb or slow AI development over fears it could displace workers and upend society.

Article content

Those concerns gained force from a run of incidents in which OpenAI’s autonomous systems slipped out of their constraints, beginning with a July breach of Hugging Face — a widely used platform for sharing AI models.

Article content

OpenAI announced on Monday it was canceling the release of its latest model, known as Astra 6.1, after internal testing by the ChatGPT-maker revealed it did not meet safety standards.

Article content

Trump, advised by Huang and his former AI czar David Sacks, has urged unfettered AI development to outpace China and fuel a US economy increasingly dependent on AI-driven growth.

Article content

The issue of data centers, the vast computing facilities the technology requires, has emerged as a flashpoint in midterm election races in both parties, with more and more communities worried about rising electricity bills and the strain on water and land.