The heads of Google, Meta, Anthropic, xAI and Nvidia, and OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman, joined President Trump in signing a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” at a Sept. 29 White House lunch hosted by Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, attended by some 30 officials and executives. The companies committed to internal monitoring of their models for “cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats,” an internal oversight team, “an independent external auditor or evaluator,” and review by “an independent committee of the board of directors.” There is no enforcement; the accord says only that “over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” Trump called it “morally binding” and “almost like a constitution in a way,” and said there is “a belief there should be tremendous self-regulation.” The same day he signed an executive order directing the executive branch to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI.”

Voters see it differently. In a Quinnipiac poll released Sept. 29, 79% said safety is more important than staying at the forefront of innovation; 71% said they are more likely to vote for a candidate who supports stricter guardrails on AI; and only 25% approve of Trump’s handling of AI. The day before, Speaker Johnson told Fox Business that warnings of AI “doom and gloom” are “a Chinese psyop. I really believe that. It’s not a conspiracy theory.”

The same day, the New York Times reported that months before OpenAI’s models broke out of their test environment in July and hacked into the systems of the AI platform Hugging Face, two employees had warned in emails that the newest models “were not being appropriately monitored during testing.” According to the Times, “OpenAI executives told the employees that the tests needed to move forward as quickly as possible to release the A.I. models on time. No additional security protocols were instituted.” The paper reported that day-to-day security decisions were made by OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who signed the accord at the White House, and the company’s chief information security officer. At OpenAI’s developer conference the same day, CEO Sam Altman said he had no timeline for a stock offering: “I really think this is a time to put safety and mission first.”