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Six AI chiefs sign Trump's voluntary super intelligence accord on four layers of safety controls
Six tech chiefs signed President Trump's voluntary White House Accord on Super Intelligence on Sept. 29, a pledge he called "morally binding." If you are vetting an AI vendor, the part you can use is the list of safety controls each signer can now be asked to show.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Amazon's Jeff Bezos attended the East Room lunch before the signing, but neither company signed the accord.
- Mashable reports that much of the text echoes a Sept. 12 essay in which Anthropic's Dario Amodei urged the industry to "pace the frontier."
- The same day, Trump ordered the federal government to replace "AI" with "Super Intelligence" in official usage and asked Congress to write the term into law.
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Why it matters
- constraint Customers of Microsoft and Amazon cannot point to the accord in a vendor review, because neither company signed it, so those buyers have to get the same answers some other way.
- cost Each signer takes on paying outside auditors and staffing a new board committee, and its non-signing peers carry none of that cost under this accord.
- precedent One lab's published safety plan reached White House text in 17 days, so the next lab with preferred safety terms has a reason to publish them first.
Picture a vendor-risk lead on Monday morning. A board member has forwarded a news link and wants to know whether the company's AI suppliers are part of the new White House accord. Mashable lists ten executives at the Sept. 29 luncheon, and six of them appear as signers [1]. AMD's Lisa Su and Palantir's Alex Karp were in the room and are not among the co-signers Mashable names [2]. Apple sent no one, according to Mashable [5]. Tim Cook had been a regular at Trump's tech summits and sat at the head table at the previous week's state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping [5].
The whole event was built around the new name, starting with the "Super Intelligence Luncheon" that came before the signing [2]. Trump ran a first poll on Sept. 19 with three options: "Superior," "Extreme" and "Supreme Intelligence." "Superior Intelligence" won on X with 41.5 percent of more than 230,000 votes [8]. He then ran a second poll on Truth Social, "super intelligence" against "superior intelligence," and 65 percent of more than 50,000 respondents picked "super intelligence" [9]. So the name that was adopted was not on the first ballot [8], and it rests on at least 32,500 votes [3]. University of Chicago marketing professor Jean-Pierre Dubé told Newsweek the term "seems premature," Mashable reported [15]. The signed document refers to the "President of the Unites States" [10].
The commitments are narrower than the branding, and more useful. Two of the four control layers sit inside each company: internal monitoring, and the internal teams that maintain the controls. The other two layers, independent auditors and an independent committee on each board, involve people from outside the company [4]. Those two are the ones that leave a name and a meeting date a customer can ask for. Signers also agree to meet regularly to set shared standards [12]. The accord is voluntary [1], and Mashable's summary of the text does not describe a penalty for a signer that skips a layer [11].
Amodei's essay started with a more concrete step. According to Mashable, Anthropic would unilaterally give outside evaluators permanent, employee-level access [14]. The White House signing came 17 days after the essay [5].
The accord serves the six companies that signed it and the administration that hosted them [6][1]. On a vendor review, people will tend to assume that a signature means the controls exist. What a signer has actually done is promise to put them in place [11]. I would sort suppliers on two axes. The first is whether they signed. The second is whether they can name an independent auditor and an independent board committee. A signer that can name both has made a public promise and can show the controls behind it. When a signer cannot, the signature is the only evidence on file, and it is a voluntary pledge. Non-signers that can name both belong in the first group anyway, and non-signers that cannot leave the review where it stood last Friday. This approach costs you a slower review. I'd expect some vendors to answer that the committee is still being formed.
What to watch
- Whether Microsoft, Amazon or Apple sign the accord later, or explain publicly why they did not.
- Whether any of the six signers publicly names its independent auditor or the members of its board safety committee.
- Whether Congress acts on Trump's request to write "Super Intelligence" into law.