President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, after meeting with top AI company executives, as House Speaker Mike Johnson of Los Angeles and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang listen.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he and a large group of artificial intelligence company executives signed a voluntary agreement that will include internal and external reviews during a White House meeting aimed at addressing Americans’ fears about the technology.
“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-regulate,” Trump told reporters at an impromptu news conference outside the West Wing.
Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with executives from major tech companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure, including data centers in communities across the country, sparking popular bipartisan opposition.
The deal was signed by Trump, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, founder of xAI, now part of SpaceX.
The agreement, which Trump posted Tuesday evening on his social media site Truth Social, opens the door to future regulation but focuses on four voluntary steps that companies must take.
The agreement states that the companies will implement “robust internal controls,” partner with an “independent external auditor” to evaluate whether the controls are working, and establish a committee on each company’s board of directors to evaluate the internal and external auditors’ reports.
“Over time, it may be appropriate to codify these measures into laws and regulations,” the agreement states.
Trump repeatedly praised business leaders for developing technology that he said would produce “incredible growth.” Investments in data centers and the computing equipment that goes with them have sped up the economy and boosted the stock market, swelling the investment accounts of higher-income Americans and increasing their spending.
There were, however, some warnings on Tuesday. Amodei, who has been one of the most vocal voices calling for a slowdown in AI development, said: “The technology carries very real risks.”
“And you know, the mechanism and how we address these risks is still under discussion,” Amodei said.
Trusting “self-monitoring” AI
Trump suggested that about 10 people would be named to a committee to “monitor the entire company” and said the deal would be “morally binding.” He also said he would appoint someone to oversee the deal in the coming days, after consulting with the industry.
Some of the actions outlined in the agreement are steps these companies are already taking in some form or have already committed to implementing.
The intent of the agreement balances the latitude needed for innovation and regulation, said Shri Narayanan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California. This innovation is not just limited to improving the capabilities of these AI models, Narayanan said, but also efforts to improve the safety and security of the models.
Other experts are skeptical about “putting so much trust in self-monitoring,” such as Robin Jia, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. Jia said it was crucial to ensure that major labs’ intentions were “well aligned with the broader interest of the American public.” He highlighted recent revelations of hacking incidents and said: “As models improve, the consequences of such things will only get worse. »
Some also took issue with the agreement’s vague and broad language. Alex Pascal, executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, said: “The only way to reduce the risks and harms of AI to Americans is to establish robust legal accountability, regulation, and fundamentally change the racial dynamics that lead to dangerous decision-making by frontier AI developers whose costs are borne by the American people. »
Trump unveils chatbot to help Americans navigate government services
Huang sat to Trump’s right during a White House lunch meeting, according to a seating chart the president posted on Truth Social. Musk sat to Trump’s left.
Earlier Tuesday, Trump pledged that the U.S. government would not limit the development of artificial intelligence or support calls for “guardrails” or other restrictions.
“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said at the unveiling of an AI chatbot, America.gov, intended to help Americans navigate government services. “We can’t stifle it, and we’re way ahead.”
The unveiling of the AI government chatbot came during a daylong event in Washington in which several Trump administration officials celebrated a “golden age” powered by what Trump insists on calling “super intelligence,” rather than artificial intelligence. Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that America.gov’s chatbot could soon be used to apply for a first passport entirely online, without the in-person visit to a processing center currently required.
Trump thinks data centers will become ‘very popular’
Trump also said the leaders agreed to quell bipartisan opposition to data centers popping up in local communities across the country by providing more financial support to local schools or taking steps to reduce energy costs.
“You’re going to see, data centers are going to be very popular,” Trump said. If opposition persists, Trump suggested, “they will be forced to go abroad or elsewhere.”
Also on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a television interview that the company was increasingly focusing on security. The day before, his company had halted the deployment of a new model for security reasons.
“We adapt our progress, which sometimes means not training a model,” he said on CNBC. “We need to do it in a way that we can present safety arguments and claims with a lot of confidence, so people don’t get too anxious.”
For his part, Trump on Tuesday described the race to develop AI as a global competition between the United States and China. He said there would be a winner and a loser, with no “second place.”
The two countries agreed last week to establish a channel to handle AI-related incidents during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington. But Trump stressed Tuesday that he didn’t want to cooperate too much with China: “I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re in the lead. Why would I want to do anything?”
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