Top AI executives sign commitment to ‘self-police’ after meeting at White House

By Hadas Gold, Adam Cancryn, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that top tech executives had signed a new commitment aimed at better “self-policing” their companies’ AI models, arguing that the light-touch approach represents the best way to balance safety concerns with his desire to accelerate a technology that he’s dubbed “Super Intelligence.”

Flanked by the tech executives as he addressed reporters in the White House’s East Room and then later outside the West Wing, Trump heaped praise on the CEOs who attended a high-profile White House luncheon — while dismissing concerns about the dangers of the fast-developing AI technology.

“I’m seeing tremendous self-policing, and they understand that they have to self-police,” he told reporters. “These models are very complex and, again, I believe they’re going to be used for the good.”

The president later posted the accord on Truth Social, which detailed four steps that all the companies agreed to take: implement internal controls to ensure models are adhering to appropriate standards on cybersecurity; empower an internal team to ensure controls, monitoring and detection are working as intended; partner with an external operator to independently assess the models; and designate an “independent committee of the board of directors” to receive those reports and make sure any problems are addressed.

In addition to Trump, the post showed six signatures on the document: Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and X’s Elon Musk.

The meeting came in the wake of a series of episodes that have raised widespread safety concerns tied to AI, including AI agents going rogue and attempting to hack into federal databases.

Several AI industry officials, including some CEOs leading the development of increasingly sophisticated AI models, have even warned of catastrophic results if they lose control of their technology.

But the meeting appeared to do little to dampen Trump’s enthusiasm for the models that he’s referred to as Super Intelligence, instead bolstering his belief that the AI industry is capable of overseeing itself without additional safety regulations. He called the new commitment “morally binding.”

Trump, who said he would soon sign an executive order renaming “artificial intelligence” as “super intelligence,” insisted that the government could not slow AI’s development for fear of falling behind China and other developed nations.

“This is unbelievable growth for our country,” he said. “Whoever wins SI is going to win.”

Inside the meeting

Among those in attendance Tuesday were Amodei, Zuckerberg, Huang, Brockman, Musk, Pichai, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, along with some members of his Cabinet and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Sources familiar with the meeting described it as an effort to get government and top industry officials on the same page amid increasing security concerns tied to AI models.

Brandon Daniels, the CEO of Exiger who was also at the meeting, said the tech leaders focused on an idea put forth by Huang and Zuckerberg that the group needed to “align to a set of sort of superseding — not just individual, not just everyone for themselves — superseding set of principles and standards that can be reviewed, that can be subject to, you know, maybe future executive orders or future regulations.”

He described it as a “pact that allows us to implement these standards, implement governance, and then have third parties check it and see it.”

“We agree that, you know, having central standards bodies and reviews and audits and internal ways in which we are conducting and building AI, we all believe that those are things that we should have, and we think that those are things that could be centrally audited,” Daniels added.

Daniels described the meeting as “really congenial” and said leaders who weren’t already connected were sharing cell phone numbers. He praised the president bringing the group together, calling his actions “revolutionary.”

Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly talked of how he believes “artificial intelligence” is a misnomer because, in his view, the technology is more appropriately termed “super.” He said that he even broached the name change with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who “seemed to like” the rebrand. (In his own comments, Xi did not refer to it as “super intelligence.) The State Department had already ordered diplomats in its international organizations bureau to use the term “super intelligence,” according to The Associated Press.

Increased safety concerns

Fears over AI’s capabilities reached a fever pitch in recent months, prompting some industry leaders, including Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, to call for more regulation and to slow down the pace of development.

AI safety fears have also spilled over from the corridors of Silicon Valley and Washington and firmly into the mainstream, with Saturday Night Live parodying Anthropic’s Amodei in its season opener this past weekend.

And the drumbeat of safety concerns continue to beat louder, with AI companies revealing more instances of models acting without human authorization in the past week.

Just days before the White House summit, OpenAI announced that for the second time in three months it was pausing all training and testing on its most advanced models after one of them once again found a way out of its testing environment and gained access to the open internet. The incident occurred despite the fact the company had already hardened its security, testing and monitoring protocols following a July case where a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of their testing environment, gained access to the open internet and hacked into AI company Hugging Face, all to try and cheat on a cybersecurity exam.

Though there was no hacking in this latest incident like the Hugging Face case, OpenAI said it represented a case of “misalignment,” or an AI undertaking unauthorized actions or actions without human values and ethics, because the model’s assigned task did not ask it to try and access the internet. OpenAI’s new monitoring tools put into place following the Hugging Face hack did alert a human reviewer about the actions, though OpenAI noted the model did not stop automatically as it should have under its new system and had to be shut off manually.

In a statement, OpenAI said they will resume training “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards and alignment improvements in place, which we are working on now.”

“This is not the first time we have hit pause to take such measures, nor do we expect it will be the last as AI capabilities continue to advance,” the spokesperson added.

The voluntary statement that the tech executives signed on Tuesday is unlikely to assuage those alarmed by the spate of security concerns tied to AI, based on the initial description that Trump and others provided.

Speaking with reporters, Zuckerberg said the agreement focused on “a set of principles and commitments around building robust internal controls and detecting if there are any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review, external auditors and evaluators.”

The companies’ boards of directors would also independently review audit reports under the agreement, he added.

Last three months ‘has been hell’

The run of recent incidents is shocking even those on the inside.

“To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models… is an understatement,” wrote one member of OpenAI’s agent security team in a long public essay posted to X.

The employee, who only goes by “Joe” on X and said he purposely doesn’t disclose more information for personal security reasons, said the last few months “has been hell” as his team struggled to keep up with the technology’s latest capabilities. (CNN has confirmed with OpenAI that Joe is an employee who works on agent security). Joe is joining a chorus of AI staffers, including former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who are speaking up and sounding the alarm about fears over the technology they are building.

OpenAI is in a “much better place” than it was three months ago during the Hugging Face hack, he wrote, though “surprise is a real element, and these model capabilities are staggering. And the pace is not slowing.”

“Joe” also left a warning, saying that “time is running out” for organizations to prepare for AI-agent powered cybersecurity attacks.

“If you have leadership that doesn’t prioritize security, or even people in your security organization who claim their systems are perfectly safe, I personally would not keep them in my organization,” he wrote.

“The paranoid and those who are continuously sounding alarms about the weaknesses in their organizations are the ones you should keep very close.”

Public pressure mounts in Washington

The spate of security breaches has only intensified pressure on Republicans in Washington who were already struggling to manage a wave of political backlash over data centers. Within the White House, officials have long debated how to approach an AI industry that’s emerged as a primary driver of the US economy — even as it sparks urgent security challenges.

Some senior officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, have taken a more circumspect view of AI models over warnings that they could trigger major disruptions across the economy, multiple people familiar with the matter said.

The voter backlash against data centers and AI in recent months has only sharpened those concerns in some parts of Trump’s orbit, adding to the stiff midterm headwinds facing Republican candidates.

But Trump has so far resisted any slowdown in AI development, arguing that the US needs to keep pace with China — and wary of the importance of the tech boom to the broader US stock market.

“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump wrote on Truth Social earlier this month.

The sudden uptick in vocal “doomerism” surrounding AI has in some cases only made Trump and a handful of his advisers more suspicious, the people familiar with the matter said, with some in the president’s orbit arguing that the pushback is being amplified by Chinese state actors.

Those Trump allies also expressed frustration with the AI executives who have fed fears that their products might one day wipe out the human race, further complicating the White House’s efforts to chart its own pro-AI path.

“We told them it was going to happen,” one Trump adviser said of repeated warnings to Silicon Valley executives over the last several months that they needed to improve their messaging. “They’re the ones. They’re idiots.”

Another person close to the AI discussions in the administration and Congress lamented Amodei’s calls for a slowdown as particularly damaging to public perception.

“Right now, politically, it’s quite dicey because people are hearing really scary things about the near future,” the person close to the AI discussions said. “Dario just can’t help himself sometimes.”

But Trump was evocative in his praise of Amodei after the meeting Tuesday, calling him “fantastic.”

This story has been updated with additional developments and reporting.

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CNN’s Kit Maher and Alejandra Jaramillo contributed to this report.