Tech CEOs Sign Voluntary AI Safety Standards at White House Meeting
Leading AI companies signed voluntary safety standards at a White House meeting hosted by President Trump, agreeing to internal controls, external audits and board-level oversight.
US President Donald Trump convened a meeting of the country's top technology executives at the White House on Tuesday, where the companies behind the world's leading artificial intelligence systems signed a set of voluntary safety standards for the development of frontier AI.
The gathering brought together Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The meeting also introduced a term intended to frame the next phase of the technology: super-intelligence.
Under the commitments outlined by the White House, companies training and deploying frontier models will be required to maintain robust internal processes and controls so that their systems behave as intended and any problems are identified and resolved quickly. The agreement sets out four layers of controls and audits.
Firms will implement internal controls to monitor model capabilities and alignment during training and deployment, covering areas such as cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats, and to ensure models do not access technical systems in unintended ways. An internal team will be empowered to verify that controls, monitoring and detection are working and that issues are remediated.
Each company will also partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator to assess whether those controls are functioning as intended. An independent committee of the board of directors will oversee the process, receive reports from the operating teams and auditors, and ensure identified issues are addressed.
The White House described the implementation of these controls and audits as critical to ensuring a safe future, adding that each participating company had committed to them. The administration is also weighing whether to codify the arrangement, described as a morally binding agreement, into law or regulation. The companies have agreed to meet regularly to establish standards and best practices.
Speaking after the meeting, Amodei said, "If we do this right, we work with the President and everyone here, we can win safely." Zuckerberg said the companies wanted to give the American people and their customers confidence that the technology works as intended, and pointed to multiple layers of auditing and controls, including internal evaluations and external audits.
Musk said he expected the nature of jobs to evolve as AI and robots transform work environments, adding that the most likely outcome would be highly beneficial. Huang said there was no conflict between innovation, technology and safety, noting that new technologies would be needed both to advance AI capabilities and to strengthen its safety.
Trump described the meeting as productive and said the participants shared a love for the country and the world. "It's almost like a constitution in a way," he said of the agreement.
The meeting follows mounting calls from within the technology industry to slow the pace of frontier AI development or risk losing control of it. While the guardrails are now in place on paper, the strength of the commitment will be tested as the technology advances.