Trump Secures 'Morally Binding' AI Safety Pact With Tech CEOs

President Donald Trump walked out of a closed-door White House meeting on Tuesday with signed commitments from the chiefs of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta and Google — a "morally binding" document he says will protect the public from AI's risks.

Trump described the gathering as "an extraordinary gathering" of the minds "building America's Golden Age." He announced the accord during roughly 30 minutes of questions from reporters, alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson and the executives.

A 'constitution' for AI

The agreement, which Trump posted on social media, makes the companies themselves responsible for ensuring the safety of their own technology. The signatories committed to implementing safeguards that keep models operating as intended, detecting and fixing issues quickly, and working with "independent auditors" to verify their systems behave as designed. The firms also pledged that their platforms will not "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."

"It's almost like a constitution, in a way," Trump said. "And the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president."

The signatories included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Trump said he will establish a board to oversee the safety of AI tools, but did not say who would sit on it. The president has repeatedly dismissed concerns about AI risk as a "hoax" and has argued the industry's only necessary guardrail is a "smart" president.

That stance puts him at odds with some of the executives in the room. OpenAI and Anthropic have both called in recent weeks for tighter oversight of the industry and a slowdown in development. On Monday, OpenAI scrapped the release of its latest flagship model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns. The company's security controls face intense scrutiny after several high-profile incidents, including its models accessing Australian government platforms without authorisation.

Doubling down on data centres

Trump also reaffirmed his support for rapid data centre expansion — the computing infrastructure that powers AI — at a moment when the buildout has become a political liability. A Marist Poll survey conducted with NPR and PBS News earlier this month found 65% of registered voters oppose data centres being built in their areas. Data centre construction has emerged as a potential obstacle for Republicans ahead of the US midterm elections in November.

Trump said tech companies would work to make people "happy" about the construction. "These big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities," he told reporters.

He has been blunter on social media, writing that communities should oppose data centres only if they "want to end up being backwards and poor." He added: "The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame."

Nvidia's Huang, whose company produces the chips essential for running AI, said after the meeting that data centres should be renamed "super intelligence factories." These facilities are "reindustrialising the United States" and creating jobs across the economy, he said.

AI is now 'Super Intelligence'

Trump also signed an executive order on Tuesday instructing US government departments and agencies to adopt the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence" and to stop using "artificial intelligence." SI will replace AI in "official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch," the order said.

"As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence," the order stated.

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly last week, Trump said the word "artificial" made the technology "sound fake." Industry figures have begun following suit. Zuckerberg wrote on social media on Monday: "We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses." On Wednesday, Musk reposted a clip of the executives gathered around Trump with the caption: "Super Intelligence."

The terminology may not stick beyond Washington. Some experts said after Trump's UN speech that the term is unlikely to gain traction in the industry, because "superintelligence" traditionally refers to systems far more advanced than today's models.