Everything’s fine! The tech bros have descended on the White House to meet with President Donald Trump and sign a “morally binding” agreement on AI safety.
At a press conference of around a dozen men in suits outside the White House, the tech leaders promised everything from an “age of abundance” (Elon Musk) to there being “no conflict between innovation, technology, and safety” (Jensen Huang), and tech being built “as we intend” (Mark Zuckerberg)
No women appeared at the press conference. According to Axios, only two of the 31 confirmed attendees at the lunch were women: Dr Lisa Su, CEO of chipmaker AMD, and Susie Wiles on the government side, who is Trump’s Chief of Staff.
It’s telling that those participating were either from government or leading executives from the AI industry – that is, companies already benefiting from AI development.
The group of tech leaders signed the White House Accord on Superintelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities, which is a voluntary, industry-authored statement of principles on AI safety.
The “superintelligence” term is Trump’s doing, who last week said they were removing the word “artificial” and would be using Superintelligence instead, or SI.
Trump told reporters the deal they have signed is “morally binding” and that he is seeing “tremendous self-policing, and they understand that they have to self police.”
He added that “whoever wins SI is going to win,” and repeated his belief that those issuing concerns about AI are all part of a “hoax”. In response to Bill Gates saying on a podcast released on Sunday that AI could kill up to a billion people, Trump said he doesn’t care what he said; he is just one voice.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laughed with President Trump while others spoke. At times, Elon Musk stood with his arms crossed, looking either bored or annoyed at the OpenAI representative getting the microphone.
OpenAI representative Greg Brockman told reporters they are building “AI to benefit everyone. We think it can lift everyone up,” a comment made a day after OpenAI issued an apology to Australia over one of its agents breaching Medicare data in June. Brockman added that “everyone coming together to agree on how to move forward safely, I think, that’s just so important.”
Zuckerberg told reporters, “We want to give the American people and our customers confidence that the technology works in the way that we intend.”
Sundar Pichai from Google described the moment as “historic and consequential” and added, “We have to make sure we are addressing the risks, and the President has asked us as an industry to step up.”
Elon Musk said AI will give everyone in the world better healthcare. When a reporter pushed back, saying they can’t have better healthcare if they don’t have a job, Musk replied, “Well, jobs are going to change. Jobs have always changed.”
Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei offered the most cautious comments of the group. “I will say what I’ve always said … AI has incredible benefits,” he told the reporters. “But I think the technology has very real risks, and the mechanism of how we address those risks is still under discussion.
“We all need to work together to make sure that we can win. And we can win safely.”