Trump announces accord signed by top AI companies to 'self-police' development

After a White House gathering with leading technology executives, President Donald Trump announced that he and the industry leaders had put their names to a voluntary agreement calling for internal and external reviews of AI systems. He described the companies as policing themselves and said they grasp that they must. Trump also said the executives had promised to ease local resistance to data centers, through added funding for schools or steps to lower energy costs, and warned that if opposition persisted, the facilities could be pushed abroad, according to PBS NewsHour.

Earlier in the day, at the debut of the America.gov chatbot, Trump vowed never to hold back a technology he expects to surpass the industrial revolution, and rejected guardrails. Attendees included Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft's Satya Nadella, along with Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Speaker Mike Johnson. Amodei, Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have urged slowing down so safety can catch up, while Huang and Zuckerberg have played down fears.

Altman said on CNBC that OpenAI is pacing its progress, sometimes skipping training a model, after halting a new model's rollout the day before over safety concerns. Trump framed AI as a race with China that the U.S. is winning, saying he saw no reason to cooperate, though the two countries agreed last week to create a channel for AI-related incidents.

Summarized by PolitiKool from PBS NewsHour’s reporting. Read the full story at PBS NewsHour →