Trump Grants AI Companies Power To Pardon Themselves
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that America’s largest artificial intelligence companies had signed a “morally binding” accord authorizing them to investigate themselves, judge themselves, discipline themselves and, when warranted, forgive themselves over lunch. Executives including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Elon Musk agreed to conduct rigorous internal reviews, followed by independent external reviews performed by consultants who understand that future contracts depend on finding nothing. Trump described the pact as a constitution for artificial intelligence, except that its principal liberty is freedom from enforceable consequences.
“Nobody has ever policed themselves better than these companies, and if they find they did something wrong, which they won’t, they’ll be extremely tough,” Trump said. “There could be a serious email, maybe even a meeting without snacks, and believe me, executives do not want that.” House Speaker Mike Johnson praised the framework’s “robust controls,” explaining that federal regulation could interfere with the industry’s obligation to release products first and identify civilization-altering defects through customer complaints. Under the agreement, companies will test advanced systems for bias, deception and catastrophic risk, then decide privately whether the results are important enough to mention before the next earnings call.
The accord follows mounting concern that increasingly capable AI systems could eliminate jobs, manipulate voters, reproduce discrimination or place essential decisions inside software nobody can explain. Those concerns will now be handled by executives whose compensation depends on assuring investors that every danger is both manageable and an excellent subscription opportunity. Companies also promised not to cause catastrophic harm unless doing so improves quarterly growth, defeats China, satisfies a previously announced launch date or can be reclassified as user error.
Americans skeptical of voluntary corporate enforcement may consult a government chatbot trained on decades of banking settlements, airline apologies, pharmaceutical disclaimers and social-media testimony. The chatbot will explain that regulation suppresses innovation, lawsuits create jobs for attorneys and fines are simply government loyalty programs for repeat customers. With industry leaders empowered to issue their own verdicts and commute their own sentences, artificial intelligence is now fully regulated by the proven principle that corporations become trustworthy the moment nobody is watching.
* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.