White House Declares AI Safe After Asking AI Companies
President Donald Trump unveiled the federal government’s most rigorous artificial intelligence safety program Tuesday, requiring technology executives to look officials directly in the eye and promise their products will not accidentally eliminate democracy, employment or the human species. House Speaker Mike Johnson joined Trump for the announcement after determining that enforceable rules could undermine the nation’s longstanding policy of letting corporations discover their own misconduct at a commercially convenient pace.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended the meeting, giving regulators access to a broad range of executives who share the same financial reason to find no problems. Calls for independent testing were dismissed as outdated because outside experts lack the stock options, venture-capital exposure and quarterly earnings targets needed to evaluate AI objectively. “These are tremendous companies with very smart people, and they told me the computers are completely safe unless we regulate them, which could upset the computers,” Trump said. “Nobody wants angry computers, so the responsible thing is to trust the people selling them.”
Under the framework, companies will privately decide whether their systems threaten elections, privacy, national security or millions of jobs. Any concerns will be disclosed promptly in a terms-of-service revision placed beneath 14,000 words of binding arbitration language. Firms that identify serious risks may appoint an internal committee, schedule a future discussion and continue deployment while the committee’s logo is being designed. Compliance will be verified by asking each chief executive whether compliance occurred.
Johnson praised the plan as a triumph of limited government, explaining that Congress cannot responsibly regulate technology it does not understand and must therefore surrender policymaking to the people profiting from it. Officials said the arrangement would allow Washington to move at the speed of innovation by remaining perfectly still while industry races ahead. Artificial intelligence is now safe because the companies selling it said so.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.