How does Trump’s White House AI accord work?

Amid calls for regulation, United States President Donald Trump met with artificial intelligence executives at the White House to put in place a voluntary pact, called the White House Accord on Super Intelligence.

The agreement, which was signed by executives at Meta, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic on Tuesday, calls on companies to put in place guardrails internally to help monitor security risks, with four layers of control.

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What does the White House Accord do and what doesn’t it do?

The agreement calls for companies to maintain internal controls, establish an internal team to oversee these controls, work with independent outside auditors and create an independent board committee to review the results.

The pact, however, is voluntary and not legally binding. It does not establish penalties for companies that fail to comply. The pact does not require companies to publicly disclose audit results or give the government an enforcement role. Companies also retain control over how the safeguards are implemented.

The agreement does, however, leave open the possibility that its measures could eventually become mandatory. It says that, over time, it might “make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations”.

“There’s going to be a tremendous self-policing aspect,” Trump told reporters, adding that it is “morally binding”.

On the White House lawn, alongside the executives, Trump claimed that AI companies had done a great job at self-policing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai also touted the agreement on social media.