Trump’s AI Safety ‘Accord’ Is a Fancy Pinky-Swear

On Tuesday, executives for Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia all signed “The White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” which was announced following a luncheon held by President Donald Trump.

The effort was an act of “tremendous self-regulation,” as Trump put it, but the agreement is not the sweeping AI regulation that people inside the companies themselves have been asking for. And while failing to honor these public commitments could count as illegally lying to consumers, even that wouldn’t be enough to trigger massive reforms.

The statement says that companies “should implement” several things: First, they should ensure they have “robust internal controls” to monitor their models’ capabilities and ability to not go rogue or hack things in unintended ways. Second, they should “empower” an internal team to do that work (and remediate when things go wrong). Third, it encourages them to partner with an external monitor who is “empowered” to do independent assessments to make sure that all of that work is happening. And finally, they should make sure their board of directors has set up a committee to receive reports about all of these efforts.

The voluntary commitments are some indication that the frontier labs are making an effort to figure out how to make products that are safe for the general public. However, if there were any hopes for a blanket blessing from the US government, those were quickly dashed after news broke that the Federal Trade Commission intends to investigate several AI companies over potential consumer protection issues.

The statement is the culmination of weeks of debate over AI regulation. It also follows frontier AI labs seeking an antitrust exemption so they can coordinate on safety work without regulatory scrutiny. (Notably, antitrust experts and practitioners say such an exemption is unneeded because AI ending humanity—which researchers have warned will come about if nothing is done—is arguably anti-competitive because humans are an essential part of any given marketplace.)

There’s been a lot of build-up to this particular statement, but this is not the first time that these companies have signed a voluntary agreement about their AI safety practices with a government. In early 2025, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Korea announced a set of “Frontier AI Safety Commitments,” which included promises about doing internal and external red-teaming of AI models for “severe and novel threats” and also “to work toward information sharing” on AI safety issues.

Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment. The White House also did not immediately respond.

Neil Chilson, a former chief technologist for the FTC, posted on X of the accords that “this is the kind of pledge that the FTC could potentially enforce, if a company materially failed to follow through on any of these promises.”

But those hoping for a sweeping settlement and a dramatic reining-in of rogue “super intelligence” based on the accords alone might find themselves disappointed.

(Disclosure: This story’s author previously worked in the Office of Technology at the FTC and resigned in November 2025.)

Not following through on a public promise could be considered a deceptive business practice and a violation of the FTC Act. When the FTC alleges that a company deceived its customers, the remedy it usually prescribes is making the company promise not to lie again.

For example, the FTC recently announced it had settled with three companies after it alleged they were touting a service that could help businesses target ads based on audio recordings collected from smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices. The companies, the agency said, lied to businesses about their ability to creep on consumers. The fix? The companies are no longer allowed to misrepresent their advertising services and the collection and use of consumers’ voice data, among other things. The case does not address whether it’s OK to collect voice data from your phone, and the settlement doesn’t set out any guardrails if one of the three companies wanted to actually do that in the future (other than not lying about it.)

OpenAI has been remarkably open about the number of times its agents have broken into other people’s systems and how it needs to improve its safety practices. But, as experts have pointed out to WIRED, the US government can open investigations into companies even if they eventually decide there’s no enforcement action to bring. (The FTC, for example, reportedly sent a civil investigative demand to OpenAI in 2023, but it’s unclear what came of that.)

Following Tuesday’s AI luncheon with Trump, the New York Post reported that the FTC was planning a “sweeping probe” into Anthropic, OpenAI, other unnamed frontier labs, and a nonprofit called METR that does third-party evaluations. METR and the labs didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Post says that the agency still hasn’t issued any civil investigative demands to its intended targets—usually one of the first steps in any sort of investigation. An FTC spokesperson confirmed that there is some sort of investigation, but they declined to provide any additional details, including what consumer protection issues were of concern.

FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was included on the “super intelligence” luncheon’s seating chart, has previously explained that enforcers don’t always have a fully baked case from the get-go. “You’re constantly looking for smoke to see if there’s fire,” he told a crowd of antitrust enthusiasts last year.

Even if the FTC investigation moves forward and the agency does identify violations, some are skeptical that it will result in any action against the AI firms.

“It should be encouraging to Americans worried about AI that the FTC is investigating these companies,” says Douglas Farrar, who was the head of public affairs for the FTC during Lina Khan’s tenure as chair. “But let’s remember that Ferguson may chair the FTC, but Donald Trump runs it, and I doubt after yesterday’s love fest with his AI CEO buddies that Trump will allow any legal action with teeth against these companies.”