WASHINGTON — After privately huddling with nearly 20 tech titans at a White House lunch Tuesday, President Donald Trump continued to push back on calls for new safety regulations for artificial intelligence, saying there was agreement in the room that there should be “tremendous self-regulation” by companies.
“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that,” said Trump, flanked by tech and government leaders.
“But the self-regulation is very important,” he said.
Moments later, outside the White House, Trump was asked whether anything would persuade him to back tougher AI guardrails or a slowdown of the industry.
“I’m seeing tremendous self-policing, and they understand that they have to self-police,” he told reporters.
In recent weeks, tech executives on the AI frontier — including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — have sounded the alarm about the potential dangers of AI, calling for greater government oversight and global cooperation in regulating the technology.
Even before Tuesday’s lunch, Trump had dismissed the existential warnings, arguing that American tech companies need to continue to innovate and keep their foot on the gas to stay ahead of China in the AI arms race.
The doomsday scenarios were a “hoax,” he said.
Tuesday’s gathering included a who’s who of the tech world, including Amodei, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su, Palantir CEO Alex Karp and OpenAI President Greg Brockman.
Trump hosted the lunch with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. Vice President JD Vance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles also attended.
The day’s events included Trump saying he would sign an executive order renaming artificial intelligence as “super intelligence.” The White House later released a document about the signed order.
Meanwhile, Johnson said after the meeting that people at the lunch had signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.”
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Zuckerberg described the document as “a set of principles and commitments around building robust internal controls and detecting if there are any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review, external auditors and evaluators.”
Companies agreed that their boards of directors would independently review the auditors’ reports, Zuckerberg said.
“I think that these are good steps forward,” he told reporters. “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.”
Trump, asked whether the accord was binding, replied: “I think it’s morally binding.” He later posted the text of the document on Truth Social.
During the lunch, Trump also addressed the proliferation of data centers, which are unpopular among voters but are being built to power AI companies. Trump, who supports data centers, said tech leaders will work with local communities and help pay for costs like energy and education.
“This is a group that loves local communities. They love our country, and they’re going to work with local communities for the data centers, in particular, and they’re going to work to make the community happy,” Trump told reporters. “That might be supplying oil and gas. It might be supplying education. It may be helping teachers along financially. ... So you’re going to see data centers are going to be very popular.”
Trump has consistently argued against regulating AI, even as the dire warnings about humans’ potentially losing control over self-improving AI systems — known as recursive self-improvement, or RSI — grow louder and more frequent.
“Whoever wins AI ... whoever wins ‘SI,’ whoever wins super intelligence, wins. That’s the group that wins, and we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way,” Trump said in his address last week to the United Nations General Assembly.
“I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution — many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself — and we will be very careful,” he said.
Johnson, a close Trump ally, began pushing for an AI summit with some of the biggest names in tech shortly after whistleblower Jacob Coxon made international headlines by resigning from Claude maker Anthropic. Coxon warned that the people building those systems believe they could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Johnson has made it clear he doesn’t believe Washington should take a heavy-handed approach to regulating AI, arguing that existing laws and regulations can be applied to AI companies and suggesting that they should be held legally liable if their products caused harm.
In an appearance Monday on Fox Business, Johnson praised Trump for convening the AI leaders in one room.
“They have a corporate responsibility, as every corporation does, to create safe products, right? And there’s product liabilities laws that apply and a labyrinth of federal regulations on all this stuff already. We do not need a moratorium,” he said.
While lawmakers have introduced dozens of AI-related bills in recent years, the GOP-controlled Congress is showing no urgency to act on the issue. House members aren’t expected back in Washington until after the Nov. 3 midterm elections, and senators could leave town as soon as this week.
“We do not need to jump in and hyperregulate this, because we’ll lose the race to China,” Johnson said on Fox Business. “The innovation is important to continue, but we have to strike the right balance.”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., didn’t attend the AI lunch, but he privately met with Amodei in the Capitol on Monday evening.
“I hope it’s productive,” Thune said ahead of Tuesday’s summit.
Before the White House lunch, Trump gathered with Vance, Cabinet members and a handful of tech leaders a few blocks away at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium to unveil America.gov, a website that features an AI-powered web portal and chatbot and aims to improve Americans’ experiences accessing federal resources.
A White House official called the tool “a new front door for the federal government that will provide a one-stop shop for Americans looking for information and resources from the federal government that are currently spread over a maze of various agency websites.”
The National Design Studio, the year-old agency launched by Trump and led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, helped create the project. Trump was introduced by self-help author and motivational speaker Tony Robbins.
“We’re launching today something that is really — it’s not just simply a website; it’s a restoration of America’s founding promise, and it’s a reinvention of your government for the 21st century and beyond,” Trump said.
“Instead of forcing citizens to search through the endless maze of tens of thousands of terrible government websites and rules ... you’ll now have one front door for every single question,” he said. “Everything will be answered easily and quickly, a digital home built around your time and your life.”
Trump likened the site to chatbots like Grok, Gemini and ChatGPT, and a White House official told NBC News that America.gov is using Gemini and Grok.
Trump also suggested he would “end” America.gov if it was ever hacked.
It “cannot, in theory, be hacked into. And when they figure a way to do that, we’ll end it, OK?” he said. “Because they always figure a way, right?”
In addition to Trump and Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz were on hand for the website unveiling.
