After a White House lunch on September 29, President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson said leaders of major AI companies had signed a voluntary accord on AI safety. The Hill reports it is called “The White House Accord on Superintelligence Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities”. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg said it includes internal controls and outside audits.
New to this? Read it in simple words
- Heads of big AI companies met President Trump at the White House.
- They signed a promise to check their own AI for risks.
- The promise is voluntary, so no law forces them to keep it.
- The full text has not been shared with the public yet.
- Accord
- A formal agreement between groups.
- Voluntary
- Done by choice, not because a law requires it.
- Audit
- A check by someone else to see if rules are being followed.
What was signed
The agreement is called “The White House Accord on Superintelligence Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities”, The Hill reports. Johnson said it sets out voluntary commitments for AI developers, and called it a “statement of principles”.
“It’s almost like a Constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that and I signed it as president,” Trump said, according to Reuters. He described it as “morally binding”.
The White House had not published the text when we wrote this, and none of the reports quotes from it.
From what Trump, Johnson and Zuckerberg told reporters. The text is not public.
What the companies promise
Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said the companies commit to “robust” internal controls and detection capabilities, with “multiple layers of auditing”. Each company’s board will independently review the auditors’ reports, he said.
“The idea isn’t that this is the only thing that we will ever do. It is that this is a start,” Zuckerberg told reporters.
Johnson spoke of “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review”, Semafor reports. He also mentioned “consequences” for companies that fall short; Semafor’s report gives no details.
Who was there, and what comes next
Those present included Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, The Hill and CBS News report. Neither outlet lists every signatory.
Trump said the administration is thinking about “a committee of sorts” of maybe 10 people, to “watch over the whole enterprise”. He also said he would name an AI czar “in the next three or four days”, CBS News reports.
Trump has argued that the US does not need new AI-specific rules. After the lunch, he said the Justice Department and the FBI would handle any regulatory issues with AI, Semafor reports.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1Research · September 29, 2026AI firms sign ‘morally binding’ self-policing pledge in White House meeting The Hill
- 2Research · September 29, 2026Trump and major AI executives sign “morally binding” voluntary controls: “It’s almost like a constitution” CBS News
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The accord’s text has not been published, so we rely on what Trump, Johnson and Zuckerberg told reporters, as reported by The Hill, CBS News, Reuters and Semafor. The accord’s name comes from The Hill. We could not check the full list of signatories.
- We gave the accord’s name as The Hill reported it before the text came out. The released text is titled “White House Accord on Super Intelligence Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities”. Trump published the text after this story; our follow-up covers what it says.