AMERICA’S most powerful technology companies have agreed to subject their rapidly developing super intelligence systems to internal risk reviews, outside audits and board-level oversight, marking an unusual industry-wide attempt to establish common safeguards while competing to dominate the emerging technology. The commitments emerged from a White House meeting with President Donald Trump that brought together leaders of companies at the forefront of the technology race, despite differences among them over the scale of the risks posed by increasingly powerful systems. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg gave one of the clearest explanations of the agreement, describing it as “the White House accord” on developing the technology safely. “The basic idea is that we wanna give the American people and our customers confidence that the technology works in the way that we intend,” Zuckerberg said. He said companies had agreed on “principles and commitments” that included robust internal controls and mechanisms to detect problems.

 

Those safeguards would be accompanied by “multiple layers” of auditing and oversight, he said, beginning with internal risk reviews and extending to outside auditors and evaluators. The companies also agreed that their boards of directors would independently review reports produced by auditors. “The idea isn’t that this is the only thing that we will ever do. It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to,” Zuckerberg said. Google chief Sundar Pichai called the moment “historic and consequential” and said the industry recognised both the potential benefits and risks. “We have to make sure we are addressing the risks, and the President has asked us as an industry to step up,” Pichai said. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, also cautioned that the technology presented risks even as he emphasised its potential. “AI has incredible benefits,” Amodei said. “But I think the technology has very real risks.” “The mechanism, how we address those risks is still under discussion,” he added. “But we all need to work, we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely.”