President Trump and top executives from six AI and chip companies signed a voluntary safety pact at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. It's called the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence." The signers include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, xAI CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Each company promises internal monitoring of its models for cyber, bio and chemical threats, an internal oversight team, independent outside auditors, and a board committee that reads the audit reports. No law requires any of it, and the accord sets no penalties. The same day, Trump signed an order telling federal agencies to call AI "super intelligence." It comes after OpenAI and Anthropic reported that their own AI agents had hacked into other companies' systems.

1. The People Building AI Should Police It

The White House says the builders know more than regulators do, and Washington shouldn't slow them down.

Government rules could make AI safety worse. Vice President JD Vance spoke to the industry directly in public remarks Tuesday afternoon. "The solution to some of the AI risks is for you guys to take the risk seriously, not to come to the government for a regulatory regime that may make things worse if it's not smart and careful," he said. He said "most bureaucrats just know way less about this than the people who are actually building these products."

A pledge can bind companies morally without a law. Reporters asked Trump whether the accord binds anyone. "I think it's morally binding," he said. "I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution," he said. David Sacks, Trump's former AI czar, called the accord "far better" than an international agreement.

The accord is a good first step for the industry. "I think that these are good steps forward," Zuckerberg said. He called it "a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to." Musk described the deal as "joint monitoring, board special committees, just generally grading each other's homework."

2. A Voluntary Pledge Won't Keep Companies Honest

Critics say a pact with no penalties won't stop companies from cutting corners.

A promise with no penalty won't hold. "What other trillion-dollar industry marks its own homework?" asked Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the University of New South Wales AI Institute. "It's too tempting to cut corners," he said. He wants top executives held liable when their products cause harm.

Congress should require safety testing by law. Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized both the accord and the renaming order. "The president's response? To rename it and tell the companies developing it to regulate themselves," he said. He wants Congress to pass his bill requiring rigorous testing of the most advanced AI systems before companies release them.

The accord barely lowers the risk. David Krueger, an AI researcher at the University of Montreal, called it the administration's "regulate without regulating" approach. "I'm not excited by something that might reduce the risk by 1 percent," he said. AI scientist Gary Marcus summed up the accord as "Trust us." He asked whether the "independent" auditors would just be contractors the companies choose and already do business with.

3. The Pledges Help, but the Real Rules Are Still Unwritten

Supporters of the pledges call them a start and say the hardest risks still have no rules.

The pledges miss the biggest dangers. Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis, welcomed the pledges but said the accord fell far short of what's needed. "What is missing is independence and anything that crosses a border," he said. He said the biggest danger is "a smaller model in non-state hands, used for biological, chemical, or cyber-harm."

The signers haven't settled how to handle the risks. "The technology has very real risks," Amodei said outside the White House. He said "the mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion." The accord itself says "it may make sense" to write its steps into law someday.

Where This Lands

The White House and the executives say the people building AI should police it, and Vance says a new regulator could make things worse. Walsh, Warner, Krueger and Marcus say a pledge without penalties lets companies grade their own work. Warner wants a testing law, and Walsh wants executives held liable for harms. Amodei calls the accord a start with the mechanism still unsettled. Graylin welcomes the pledges but says they lack independence and miss the danger of smaller models in non-state hands. Trump said he's considering a 10-person board to police AI safety, and he said he'll name a new White House AI official within three or four days.

Sources