Here’s how tech leaders will self-police AI safety under Trump’s deal
Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia signed Trump's voluntary frontier AI safety commitment.
President Trump and leaders from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia signed the Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities, a voluntary pledge to self-regulate frontier AI. Each company agrees to monitor model capabilities and alignment for cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical risks, staff an internal control team, use an independent external evaluator, and have a board committee oversee remediation. The text sets no penalties and says the steps might later be written into law.
- Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia signed the accord.
- Rules cover monitoring, an internal team, an external auditor, and board oversight.
- Named risk areas include cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats.
- The commitment sets no penalties and is not yet law.
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We now have the full details of the “morally binding” AI safety deal announced by President Trump yesterday, in which top executives agreed to self-regulate their artificial intelligence technology. The accord, officially titled the Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities, was shared online by tech founder and presidential advisor David Sacks, and has been signed by Google’s Sundar Pichai, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, XAI’s Elon Musk, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.
“In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public,” reads the opening line of the document. “The participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems.”
The agreement outlines four rules for each company that aim to ensure frontier AI models behave as intended, and that any problems are quickly identified and resolved:
1) Implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.
2) Empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated.
3) Partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended.
4) Designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors and evaluators, as well as to ensure any issues identified are remediated.
The agreement says these steps will give the companies, their users, and the general public — which have mounting concerns around AI safety — “confidence that the technology is operating as intended.” A later passage also says that “over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.”
In their current state, these rules are mostly vague, common-sense safety procedures for any tech company, and don’t mention any penalties for violating the agreement, making this little more than a pinky promise from AI leaders to do the bare minimum. And that’s despite Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic having all violated that first rule over the last few months when their AIs went rogue and hacked other companies and even government websites.
Trump introduced the deal yesterday at the same time as ordering the US government to refer to AI as ‘Super Intelligence’ going forward, reasoning that the word “artificial” sounds bad and “super is the best word of all.” Alongside the tech oligarchs, Trump added his own signature to the AI safety agreement, with his title listed as “President of the Unites States.”
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- Jess Weatherbed