At A.I. Event, Trump Asks Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft to Make Safety Decisions Themselves - The New York Times

Three of the most powerful companies on earth were summoned to an A.I. event — presumably with a lectern and a flag — and asked to write their own safety rules. Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft duly signed a voluntary agreement covering risk reviews, auditing and evaluations by third parties. Not a statute, not a regulator, not a fine with a number in it: a promise. Every one of those measures is something a legislature could have mandated, with signatures and consequences attached, and instead every one of them now rests on the good faith of the companies being measured. That is not oversight; that is a letterhead.

And then the rebranding: A.I. is now to be called 'super intelligence,' Mr. Trump's preferred term, adopted by all three companies. One suspects the naming meeting ran considerably longer than the compliance discussion. It is a lovely upgrade — 'artificial intelligence' always sounded faintly counterfeit, whereas 'super intelligence' arrives with an implied cape and its own cereal aisle. Note what the headline actually says: the President asked Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft to make these safety decisions themselves. Note also who the agreement binds, which is nobody, and who it reassures, which is everyone holding a share price.

Third-party evaluations are in there, which raises the only question that matters and which the reporting leaves unanswered: who picks the third parties? Round up the usual consultancies, presumably, the ones who bill by the hour and have never met a system they couldn't describe as broadly aligned. Meanwhile the regulatory gap — the distance between what these systems can do and what any legislature has actually passed — stays exactly as wide as it was this morning, only now with a signed sheet of paper resting on top of it. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman and Satya Nadella have agreed to grade their own homework, in the President's preferred font.