Trump and AI leaders sign accord over new technology

US president Donald Trump has joined the leaders of major artificial intelligence (AI) companies in signing a voluntary accord that will include internal and external reviews of the technology.

After the meeting with a large group of senior tech figures at the White House, Mr Trump told reporters outside the West Wing: “I think I’m seeing tremendous self-policing.

“And they understand that they have to self-police.”

Details of the accord were not immediately available.

.@POTUS: "We're going to be signing a document today at about 5p renaming Artificial Intelligence because it's not artificial. We all agree on that. We're going to be renaming it Super Intelligence — officially renaming it." https://t.co/iCLObeDavb pic.twitter.com/EcySpHBUwz

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 29, 2026

The announcement followed an extensive meeting between Mr Trump and numerous leading executives from top tech firms that are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out AI infrastructure – including data centres in communities across the country that have sparked grassroots, bipartisan opposition.

Many of the executives gathered in Washington have called for a slowdown in the development of the technology after several high-profile incidents where AI agents have gone rogue.

Earlier on Tuesday, Mr Trump promised that the US government would not limit the development of AI, nor would he support calls for “guardrails” or other restrictions.

“I will never stifle the growth of a technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Mr Trump said at the unveiling of an AI chatbot, America.gov, intended to help Americans navigate government services.

“We can’t stifle it, and we’re leading by a lot.”

Top AI executives met with Mr Trump at the White House on Tuesday, including Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, and Elon Musk, whose X social media platform includes its own AI model, Grok.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang sat to Mr Trump’s right at Tuesday’s White House lunch, according to a seating chart the US president posted on Truth Social.

Mr Musk sat to Mr Trump’s left. Google boss Sundar Pichai, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft chief Satya Nadella also attended.

Mr Trump’s bullishness on AI contrasts with the alarms sounded recently by some AI executives, including Mr Amodei, who earlier this month called for leading firms to slow down their development of the technology.

Mr Musk and OpenAI chief Sam Altman also called for allowing safety measures to catch up as companies reported mounting examples of AI agents going rogue.

Other executives, particularly Mr Huang and Mr Zuckerberg, have downplayed the concerns about runaway AI and underlined the responsibility of each company to ensure the safety of their products.

US vice president JD Vance, treasury secretary Scott Bessent, and Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson, also attended.

The unveiling of the AI chatbot occurred at a daylong event in Washington during which multiple Mr Trump administration officials celebrated a “Golden Age” fuelled by what the US leader insists on calling “super intelligence”, rather than artificial intelligence.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio highlighted that America.gov could soon be used to apply for a first-time passport fully online, without an in-person visit to a processing centre that is currently required.

Speaking to reporters after the lunch with tech bosses, Mr Trump said there had been widespread agreement on “self-regulation” by the AI developers, “and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that”.

He also said the executives had agreed to assuage the bipartisan opposition to data centres cropping up in local communities across the country, by providing more financial support to local schools or taking steps to reduce energy costs.

“You’re going to see, data centres are going to be very popular,” Mr Trump said. If the opposition continued, Mr Trump suggested, “they’ll be forced to go overseas or other locations”.

Also Tuesday, Mr Altman said in a television interview that the company is increasingly focused on safety. The day before, his company halted the rollout of a new model over safety concerns.

“We are pacing our progress, which includes sometimes not training a model,” he said on CNBC. “We have to do these in a way where we can make very confident safety cases and claims, so that people don’t have a bunch of anxiety.”

For his part, Mr Trump portrayed the race to develop AI as largely a global competition between the United States and China, with America in the lead.

He said there would be a winner and a loser, with no “second place”.

The two countries agreed last week to establish a channel for handling AI-related incidents during Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington.

But Mr Trump underlined that he did not want to cooperate too much with China: “I didn’t want to do anything, because we’re leading. Why would I want to do anything?”