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US President Donald Trump convened a gathering of the country's most powerful technology executives at the White House on Tuesday, an event he described as an "extraordinary gathering" of the minds responsible for "building America's Golden Age." The meeting brought together the leadership of OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, Google, and SpaceX, placing the central architects of the American artificial intelligence industry in a single room with the president and House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The summit unfolded against a backdrop of growing unease among some technologists and researchers, who have spent months urging stricter government oversight of AI and even a deliberate slowdown in its development, warning that the technology could pose existential risks to humanity. Rather than announcing new regulation, however, the president emerged with a voluntary agreement signed by the companies themselves — a document he characterized as "morally binding" and a "form of protection" against the dangers of advanced AI.
Under the terms of the accord, which Trump published on social media, each participating company assumes responsibility for ensuring the safety of its own technology. The firms committed to putting safeguards in place so their models operate as intended, and to detecting and repairing problems quickly when they arise. They also pledged to work alongside "independent auditors" who will evaluate whether their AI systems behave as designed and confirm that their platforms do not "hack or access technical systems in unintended ways."
The agreement carries the signatures of Trump himself alongside Google chief Sundar Pichai, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. "It's almost like a constitution, in a way," the president told reporters. "And the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president."
Trump also said he intends to establish a board to oversee the safety of AI tools, though he did not say who would serve on it or when it would begin its work. The announcement of a supervisory body sits awkwardly beside the president's long-standing public posture on the issue: he has repeatedly dismissed warnings about AI risk as a "hoax" and has argued that the only "guardrail" the industry requires is a "smart" president.
The push for stronger safeguards has nonetheless been gaining momentum inside the industry itself. OpenAI and Anthropic have both called in recent weeks for tighter oversight and a slower pace of development. On Monday, OpenAI said it had scrapped the release of its newest flagship model, GPT-6.1 Astra, citing safety concerns. The company's security controls have been under intense scrutiny following a series of high-profile incidents, including its models accessing Australian government platforms without authorisation.
Trump devoted a substantial portion of his remarks to defending the rapid build-out of data centres, the vast computing facilities that underpin modern AI systems. Construction of these sites has encountered resistance in communities across the country, driven by worries about electricity consumption and the local impact of the facilities. The issue has also become a potential political liability for Trump's Republican Party as the November midterm elections approach. A survey conducted earlier this month by Marist Poll in partnership with NPR and PBS News found that 65% of registered voters opposed data centres being built in their own areas.
The president responded to those concerns by predicting that technology companies would make residents "happy" about new construction. "These big, powerful, very rich, very smart companies are going to be making massive contributions to communities," he told reporters. He had previously written on social media that the only reason a community should oppose a data centre is if it "wants to end up being backwards and poor," adding that "there are plenty of other places that want them" and warning against killing "the Golden Goose."
Nvidia's Jensen Huang, whose company manufactures the chips essential to running AI systems, offered his own reframing of the debate after the meeting. He argued that data centres ought to be called "super intelligence factories," describing them as engines that are "reindustrialising the United States" and creating jobs across the wider economy.
Trump capped the day with an executive order that directs US government departments and agencies to adopt the terms "SI" and "Super Intelligence" and to stop acknowledging the term artificial intelligence. Under the order, SI will replace AI in "official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch." The directive argues that as these capabilities continue to improve, they represent "not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence."
The linguistic shift follows the president's address to the United Nations General Assembly last week, during which he took issue with the word "artificial" itself as a description of the technology. Taken together, the day's developments suggest a White House strategy built on voluntary industry commitments, aggressive infrastructure expansion, and a rebranding of the technology — rather than the binding regulation that some executives and safety advocates have spent months demanding.
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