President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, after meeting with top executives from artificial intelligence companies, as House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang listen.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
hide title
toggle title
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he and a large group of leaders of artificial intelligence companies had signed a voluntary agreement that will include internal and external reviews during a meeting at the White House aimed at addressing Americans’ fears about the technology.
“I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing. And they understand that they have to self-police,” Trump told reporters during an impromptu news conference outside the West Wing.
Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson met with top executives from major tech companies that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build artificial intelligence infrastructure, including data centers in communities across the country, sparking grassroots bipartisan opposition.
The deal was signed by Trump, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk, founder of xAI, which is now part of SpaceX.
The agreement, which Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, on Tuesday night, opened the door to future regulation but focused on four voluntary measures that companies were required to take.
The agreement said the companies would implement “robust internal controls,” partner with an “independent external auditor” to evaluate whether the controls were working, and establish a committee within each company’s board of directors to evaluate the internal and external auditors’ reports.
“Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws and regulations,” the agreement said.
Trump repeatedly praised business executives for developing technology that he said would produce “incredible growth.” Investment in data centers and the computing equipment that comes with them has accelerated the economy and boosted the stock market, boosting the investment accounts of higher-income Americans and raising their spending.
However, there were some notes of caution on Tuesday. Amodei, who has been one of the most outspoken voices calling for a slowdown in AI development, said: “The technology has very real risks.”
“And, you know, the mechanism, the way we address those risks, is still under discussion,” Amodei said.
Relying on ‘self-controlled’ AI
Trump suggested that about 10 people would be appointed to a committee to “oversee 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 described in the agreement are measures that these companies are already taking in some form or have previously committed to doing so.
The agreement’s intent balances the room needed for innovation with regulation, said Shri Narayanan, a university professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California. That innovation is not just limited to improving the capabilities of these AI models, Narayanan said, but also efforts to improve the safety of the models.
Other experts are skeptical about putting “so much faith in self-control,” like Robin Jia, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. Jia said it is crucial to ensure that leading labs’ intentions are “well aligned with the broader interest of the American public.” He pointed to recent revelations of hacking incidents and said: “As the models improve, the consequences of such things will only become greater.”
Some also took issue with the agreement’s broad and vague 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 for Americans is through strong legal accountability, regulation, and a fundamental shift in the racial dynamics that are driving unsafe decision-making by frontier AI developers whose costs are borne by the American people.”
Trump introduces chatbot to help Americans navigate government services
Huang sat to Trump’s right during a White House lunch, 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 artificial intelligence chatbot, America.gov, aimed at helping Americans navigate government services. “We can’t suppress it and we’re winning by a lot.”
The unveiling of the government AI chatbot came at a day-long event in Washington during which several Trump administration officials celebrated a “Golden Age” powered by what Trump insists on calling “superintelligence,” rather than artificial intelligence. Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the America.gov chatbot could soon be used to apply for a passport for the first time completely online, without the in-person visit to a processing center that is currently required.
Trump thinks data centers will become ‘very popular’
Trump also said executives had agreed to mitigate bipartisan opposition to data centers emerging in local communities across the country by providing more financial support to local schools or taking steps to reduce energy costs.
“You’ll see that data centers will be very popular,” Trump said. If the opposition continues, Trump suggested, “they will be forced to go abroad or to other places.”
Also on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a television interview that the company is increasingly focused on security. The day before, his company halted the launch of a new model for safety reasons.
“We are pacing our progress, which sometimes includes not training a model,” he said on CNBC. “We have to do this in a way where we can present very reliable cases and safety claims, so that people don’t have a lot of anxiety.”
For his part, Trump on Tuesday described the race to develop AI as a largely 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 did not want to cooperate too much with China: “I didn’t want to do anything because we are leaders. Why would I want to do anything?”
