PRESIDENT TRUMP, TECH BOSSES SIGN VOLUNTARY PACT PLEDGING ‘ROBUST’ AI SAFEGUARDS

Wed 30 September 2026:

US President Trump touts self-regulation amid calls from the international community and industry for formal rules.

United States President Donald Trump and top tech executives have signed an accord promising greater safeguards for artificial intelligence amid growing concerns that the frontier technology is exposing humanity to catastrophic risks.

Trump announced the voluntary accord on Tuesday after gathering AI leaders at the White House for a luncheon event that reaffirmed his administration’s scepticism of government regulation of the rapidly advancing technology.

“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that,” Trump said while seated alongside tech executives.

Under the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities, bosses at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Nvidia pledged to implement “robust” controls to monitor AI models and appoint internal teams to “ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated”.

The companies also pledged to partner with independent external auditors to ensure the safeguards are working as intended and to meet regularly to “establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems”.

The accord, which does not stipulate who would carry out third-party evaluations, states that it “may make sense” to codify the measures into law or formal regulations in the future.

“Regardless of whether this is required of companies, we believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone, and each of our companies are committed to doing this,” the accord states.

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‘Pace the frontier’

The six signatories are Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, xAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

The accord comes as the Trump administration is at odds with calls for urgent action to regulate AI from both the international community and key industry figures, including Anthropic’s Amodei, who has urged developers to slow down and “pace the frontier”.

Twenty countries and the European Union last week issued a call for global coordination to ensure AI remains under human control, including the potential creation of an oversight body to set and enforce standards.

Trump has rejected calls for supranational regulation, telling the United Nations General Assembly last week that his administration would oppose “any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” AI.

Trump has also dismissed calls from the industry for a slowdown in development, despite warnings of catastrophic and even existential risks, citing the need to maintain a lead over China.

The risks of AI escaping human control have received scrutiny following a slew of cases of AI agents going rogue and conducting cyberattacks on organisations and government agencies.

On Monday, OpenAI announced that it would not release its latest AI model after identifying safety risks during in-house testing.

The creator of ChatGPT also separately issued a public apology for its handling of a series of incidents in which its AI agents gained unauthorised access to Australian government websites, including a national healthcare database.

Trump’s accord drew a mixed response on Tuesday, with critics noting its nonbinding nature and limited details.

Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who previously served as Trump’s AI tsar, called the accord “far better” than an international agreement that would “probably never happen”.

“President Trump continues to ensure that the U.S. remains the technology leader while putting Americans first,” Sacks said in a post on X.

Alvin Wang Graylin, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis, welcomed the pledge by industry leaders but said it fell far short of what was needed.

“The most serious risk to Americans is not a Chinese superintelligence. It is a smaller model in non-state hands, used for biological, chemical, or cyber-harm,” Graylin told Al Jazeera.

“Putting that on paper, with Zuckerberg and Huang in the room alongside Amodei, is better than another year of ‘we cannot regulate because China will not’,” Graylin said.

“What is missing is independence and anything that crosses a border. The companies drafted the principles, they hire the auditor, and the commitment is voluntary, on a day the White House also said it would not support guardrails,” he added.

‘Incompetent and careless’

Toby Walsh, chief at the UNSW AI Institute in Sydney, Australia, said AI companies had already proven “incompetent and careless at managing themselves”.

“What other trillion-dollar industry marks its own homework?” he told Al Jazeera.

“It’s too tempting to cut corners,” Walsh said, adding that top executives should be held liable for the harms caused by their products.

“We should be billing them for all the time put into identifying and fixing these cyberattacks,” he said.

David Krueger, an AI expert at the University of Montreal who advocates a pause in development, criticised the accord as vague and a further example of the Trump administration’s reliance on self-regulation.

“The Trump administration is continuing its ‘regulate without regulating’ approach, where everything is ostensibly voluntary, but there is an implicit threat of punishment for noncompliance,” Krueger told Al Jazeera.

“If you look at the substance, it’s interesting that it calls for external evaluators, so it might result in a minute improvement over the status quo,” Krueger said.

“But I’m not excited by something that might reduce the risk by 1 percent.”

By John Power

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