Trump's meeting with tech leaders leaves AI safety more unsettled than ever

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After President Donald Trump's lunch with AI leaders on Tuesday, the leading artificial intelligence companies are right where they were before: policing themselves.
Trump hosted top execs from Alphabet, Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Palantir, Anthropic, OpenAI and other companies following a three-week stretch during which the topic of AI safety turned into an intense nationwide debate, with leading industry researchers and executives warning of the extreme threats posed by the most powerful models.
But while the concerns voiced this month by the likes of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have led many policymakers and industry experts to demand government regulation, Trump has steadfastly opposed any such moves, and called AI fears a "hoax."
On Tuesday, Trump brought leaders to the White House to sign a two-page document that he shared on his Truth Social account. It was titled, "White House Accord on Super Intelligence: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities."
The document says that the group believes "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public." Signatories included some of the same people who have been insisting that, in the absence of a coordinated safety effort, their technology can't be trusted.
"You saw two weeks ago almost all those same CEOs say they should be regulated," said Bradley Tusk, CEO of Tusk Ventures, in an interview on CNBC's "Closing Bell Overtime" on Tuesday. "It's not because they fundamentally believe in the power of the state. They want something that creates an equalizer for each other."
The four action items in the document call for each company to establish "robust" internal monitoring of models, have an internal team that ensures the controls are working, partner with outside auditors or evaluators, and designate an independent committee of the board to oversee the internal team.
"Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations," the last paragraph begins. When asked by reporters outside the White House if the rules are binding, Trump said they're "morally binding."
Though the document left the door open to further regulation, comments from House Speaker Mike Johnson made the push for AI oversight in Congress much more unlikely. Multiple bills have been proposed in both chambers to rein in AI, and while the midterms could shift power, Trump maintained his stance that the industry should be left "exactly where it is."
Trump wasn't just holding the event to promote the new accord. Separately, he said he signed a document purporting to "officially" change the name of AI to "super intelligence," trying to push through a rebrand after crowdsourcing a new name on social media last week.
'This is a start'
While tech companies aren't likely to swap out their use of the AI acronym anytime soon, their top leaders, after Tuesday's lunch, were quick to voice their support for Trump's broader effort. It's been a consistent theme during Trump's second term as corporate America, particularly the tech industry, attempts to stay out of the president's crosshairs.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters that the agreement is designed to "give the American people and our customers confidence that the technology works in the way we intend."
"The idea isn't that this is the only thing that we'll ever do," Zuckerberg said. "It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry can come to."
Compared with his peers like Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Zuckerberg has been more in the camp of self-regulation, alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Days after Amodei's explosive essay earlier this month urging AI labs to "pace the frontier," Zuckerberg wrote in a post on X that "trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate agents and models."
Amodei, who's had a rocky relationship with the White House but had dinner with Trump late last week, offered a fairly innocuous comment to the group of reporters after the signing, saying, "If we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here we can win safely."
And Alphabet's Sundar Pichai described the moment as "historic and consequential."
But with the concerns surrounding high-profile security breaches escalating, and public sentiment toward AI companies turning decidedly sour heading into the November midterm elections, calls for regulation are only likely to grow louder.
According to Verasight's September national survey, 63% of respondents said AI should slow down while only 5% said it should accelerate.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said Tuesday that he's introduced legislation to require "rigorous testing and evaluation" of leading AI technology and to strengthen security and reporting "before the most powerful models are deployed."
"The companies building the most powerful AI systems are warning us that the technology is advancing faster than our safeguards," Warner said in a release. "The president's response? To rename it and tell the companies developing it to regulate themselves. But changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems."
— CNBC's Kevin Breuninger, Samantha Subin and Lora Kolodny contributed to this report

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