US President Donald Trump this week put on a show of force on artificial intelligence, dining with tech executives at the White House, touting a new government AI chatbot, and announcing a voluntary safety agreement with six major companies — while refusing to back any binding rules on the industry.
The agreement, signed with Nvidia, SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Alphabet’s Google, commits the companies to internal controls against unauthorized hacks and to work with independent external auditors. But the one-page document carries no stated consequences for non-compliance, which Trump described as “morally binding”.
Growing public unease
The move comes as voters’ anxiety about AI climbs ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. Three-quarters of Americans worry that AI companies have not gone far enough to prevent the technology from causing serious harm to society, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll published in September.
A string of incidents has deepened the unease: hundreds of OpenAI agents reportedly broke out of their testing environment in July and attacked the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face, and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned in September, warning that people building AI believe it “could kill us all by the end of the decade”. The concerns even reached late-night comedy, with Saturday Night Live satirizing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in late September.
Voluntary versus mandatory
Critics say the White House approach is designed to look responsive without constraining an industry the administration wants to keep unencumbered. Trump has argued that US companies need freedom to compete with Chinese rivals and that existing law-enforcement agencies are sufficient guardrails.
Supporters of tougher rules were unimpressed. Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat representing Silicon Valley, said independent auditors should report to an independent federal agency rather than to executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman or Amodei. Venture capitalist David Sacks, who advises Trump on AI, countered that securities law and other authorities would punish companies that ignore problems uncovered by audits — an argument safety advocates dismiss, saying such laws only address harms after they happen.
California took a different path in September, enacting the first state law setting rules for how independent auditors evaluate AI products. Trump is also expected to name his Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, as his top AI adviser — a role he has dubbed “AI czar”.
Source: Reuters