The White House dinner was followed on Tuesday by a luncheon, and this time a document came out of it. Donald Trump posted the one-pager on Truth Social: a single sheet his administration calls an accord, signed by him and by the bosses of Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, X and Nvidia. Trump calls it “morally binding”. House Speaker Mike Johnson calls it a statement of principles that is “voluntary on behalf of the industry”.
What the sheet asks for
Four layers of controls inside the companies:
- An external auditor or evaluator to independently assess whether a company’s AI control and monitoring systems work as intended.
- An independent board committee to receive reports from the internal and external auditors and from the teams running those controls.
- Internal controls tracking model capabilities and alignment during training and deployment, named specifically for cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats, so that models “do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways”.
- An internal team checking that all of that monitoring and detection is actually running.
Two sentences set the document’s character. “Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations,” it says, adding that regardless of whether anyone requires it, the companies consider these controls and audits critical. And the signatories say they will meet regularly to work out standards and best practices.
What Trump said around it
Speaking to reporters, Trump said he was “seeing tremendous self-policing” and that his administration is considering a 10-person committee to oversee the AI industry. He still rejects new federal rules: “There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that. But the self-regulation is very important.” He called sprawling data centres “a very positive thing”, and said a new AI czar is coming within three or four days.
Amodei stood outside the White House and held his line. Rules for the risks he has spent weeks describing are “still under discussion”. Then: “We all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely. If we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.”
The seating chart Trump also posted did not put him at the centre. Next to the president sat Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, then Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai. Opposite was JD Vance, between Jeff Bezos and Johnson.
An accord that drafts its own successor
The most telling sentence is the one about codifying the steps into law. A voluntary paper that writes in the possibility of its own legalisation isn’t a refusal of regulation. It is a proposal for what regulation should look like, filed before anybody else files one. The four layers are governance pieces that large labs either have or claim to have. Committing to them costs the signatories little and saves legislators the question of where to start.
What’s missing is any statement of what happens when an auditor finds something. “Morally binding” is the most honest phrase of the day, because it describes exactly how much enforcement the sheet contains: none. That Amodei signs it anyway, while waiting on rules that remain “under discussion”, is the real status report.