What just happened? Donald Trump has announced that the CEOs of the biggest tech and AI companies in the US have signed a "morally binding" agreement to establish controls on artificial intelligence. The president used the announcement to reiterate his support for data centers, too, claiming tech companies will make communities "happy" about their construction. He also signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence to "superintelligence."
After a meeting with executives that included SpaceX's Elon Musk, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Trump announced the Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities.
Under the agreement, which Trump posted to his Truth Social platform, companies agree to have robust internal processes and controls to ensure their technology behaves as intended, and that any issues are promptly resolved. They are also asked to partner with external auditors to ensure the controls, monitoring and detection are working as intended and that their models do not "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."
Trump added that a board would be created to oversee the safety of AI tools, though he never said who would be appointed.
"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 agreement appears completely voluntary; there's no mention of any repercussions should a company fail to live up to the "morally binding" deal. It also appears that companies can choose their own evaluators and aren't compelled to make their findings public.
Trump also doubled down on his support for data center construction. "These big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities," Trump told reporters. He previously said those protesting the facilities were "making a mistake." The president also said the only reason communities should oppose data centers is if they want to "end up being backwards and poor."
Credit: Bloomberg
Something else Trump reiterated was his previous call to rename artificial intelligence "Super Intelligence." Trump signed an executive order instructing US government departments and agencies to start using the term, or "SI," when referring to the technology. The order said SI will take the place of AI in "official correspondence," websites, reports and other forms of communication.
"As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence," the order said. Trump previously said the word "artificial" made the technology sound "fake."
Some tech bosses, including Musk and Zuckerberg, have started using the term, but it seems extremely unlikely that the public will do the same.
After the agreement was announced, Zuckerberg said that it was created to assure the American public that their technology was trustworthy.
How much impact the Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities has on the industry remains to be seen. Following a series of AI agents from different companies going rogue, several firms have announced new safety measures and a pause in frontier model training. Moreover, some of the safeguards in the agreement already exist and have done little to prevent the security incidents.
