President Donald Trump said that tech leaders he met with at the White House on Tuesday had signed a “constitution” to police themselves amid dire warnings from artificial intelligence leaders about the technology.
House Speaker Mike Johnson said the agreement was voluntary.
The meeting came as AI leaders are issuing warnings about the threat of AI and calling for steps to slow it down before it outsmarts humans. Following those warnings, lawmakers are weighing what — if any — action should be taken.
Along with Johnson and members of Trump’s Cabinet, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended the meeting along with Elon Musk, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Jensen Huang from Nvidia, Palintir’s Alex Karp and Shyam Sankar, Amaxzon’s Jeff Bezos, and Greg Brockman from OpenAI.
The president indicated before the meeting that he didn’t want global collaboration or regulation of the industry and said he discussed it with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House last week.Â
“We talked about it, not that much because I didn’t want to do anything. We’re leading, so why would I want to do anything? And, and a lot of people said, ‘Let’s do it together with China.’ But then they’re going to be able to immediately gain access to things that we know that they don’t know. But we do work with them in so many ways,” Trump said.
“We’re leading now over China and everyone else and I want to keep it that way. I want to keep it that way,” Trump said. “The only way you can keep it that way is to do exactly what we’re doing right now. We don’t want to stifle growth.”
The president repeated that law enforcement would be the key mechanism in stopping companies who “go down a very dark and dangerous path” on AI.
 “At the same time, we want people to behave honestly. We want them to be trustworthy, and that’s why we have the DOJ. That’s why we have the FBI. That’s why we have forms of government that are very effective if people decide to go down a very dark and dangerous path,” Trump said.
Zuckerberg has pushed back on calls from other tech leaders to collectively slow down AI, saying “every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely.”
The meeting will also include other tech leaders.
This won’t be the first time that top tech leaders have met with Trump on the issue. The Meta CEO also attended the state dinner at the White House for Chinese President Xi Jinping last week, along with the CEOs of OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, AMD, SpaceX and executives from Amazon and Apple. Amodei also had dinner with Trump late on Sunday night.’
The president has said that the warnings about the technology and calls to slow down AI development are a “hoax.”
“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX[…],” Trump said in a social media post in mid-September, before comparing the warnings to his impeachments.
The president has made clear that he does not believe in regulating the technology. Just last week while addressing the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said the U.S. “rejects” a global attempt to regulate AI.
Johnson told reporters two weeks ago about the meeting, saying there would be “a deliberate discussion about the responsibility of the companies to maintain safety, and what role, if any, the government has to play in that.”
While Johnson called on the companies to “self-regulate,” he also also stressed that the U.S. should not lose its competitive edge in the space.
“We cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, because then we will lose our edge to China, and that has serious national security implications for,” Johnson said.
On Monday, Johnson said the the fears of the threat of AI is a Chinese psychological operation and are politically motivated.
“This is what Democrats do. They glom on to something and say, ‘This is doom and gloom and everyone will die if we don’t win,'” he told Fox Business. “Don’t buy it. It is a Chinese psyop.”
The White House has not responded to ABC News when asked about the meeting.
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