Trump “Very Close” To Unveiling AI Czar, Praises Techlords Inking “Morally Binding” Self-Regulation Pact As Tech Rebranded

Amid a backlash against data centers, worries of massive job loss and doomsday warnings from the industry itself, Donald Trump stood with top tech CEOs and pitched a rebrand.

“We’ve changed the name officially to SI,” Trump told reporters gathered just outside the West Wing, referring to the switch from “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence.”

The president planned to sign an executive order as such on Tuesday afternoon, but it remains to be seen whether it actually will take hold when AI has become so ubiquitous.

Standing with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and SpaceX’s Elon Musk, among others, Trump also said that the White House meeting between the top executives produced a “self-policing” agreement and one that would be “morally binding.”

Three years ago, when Joe Biden was president, many of the same CEOs gathered on Capitol Hill for a forum on AI led by then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. But that meeting, along with others he held to address concerns over the technology, produced no new regulation.

Among those also at the White House summit were Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Google’s Sundar Pichai. Absent was Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Before the meeting, Trump posted a seating chart, showing him sitting between Huang and Musk.

Earlier this month, Amodei triggered a new round of consternation over AI when he wrote an essay calling for development to be slowed, warning of a “swarm” of AI agents taking over the internet in six to 12 months. He said that recent incidents had raised alarm over the ability of agents to act on their own.

But Trump has continued to dismiss calls for greater regulation, warning of a race with China to dominate the technology. He’s also expressed continued support for data centers even amid a backlash in local communities, with lawmakers in both parties lending support to calls for greater controls on development.

“The data centers are incredible,” Trump said. “And by the way I am very good at real estate. Some of those buildings are absolutely beautiful. They are big strong powerful buildings but they are beautiful.”

Zuckerberg said, “I think what we can all agree on is that the American public and our customers want to know that what we are building is working the way we intended. We drafted a set of principles and commitments around building robust internal controls and detecting any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review, external auditors and evaluators, and agreeing that we are going to have all of our board of directors independently review the reports that come from the auditors.”

He added, “The idea isn’t that this is the only thing we will ever do, it is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry can come to.”