Three main takeaways from Trump’s summit with the ‘minds building America’s Golden Age’ on ‘Superintelligence’

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday organized a meeting with top technology leaders, for what he called an “extraordinary gathering” of the minds that are “building America’s Golden Age”.

The guest list included executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, SpaceX, Meta and Google – all key figures in the U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) industry.

The meeting took place at a time when some technology leaders and experts have called for stricter oversight of AI, citing concerns about the possible risks it poses to humanity.

Here are three main takeaways from Trump’s technology summit at the White House.

The AI “self-regulation” pact

After the closed-door meeting, Trump answered questions from the media for about 30 minutes, together with the top technology leaders.

The president said the leaders had signed a “morally binding” document, which would serve as a “form of protection” from the possible risks of AI.

Under the agreement, which Trump published online, the companies bear the responsibility for guaranteeing the safety of their technology, foreign media write, as Telegrafi reports.

The companies also agreed to implement protective measures to ensure the models work as intended and to quickly discover and solve any problem.

They will also cooperate with “independent auditors” to assess whether their AI systems work properly and to guarantee that their platforms do not “interfere (hack) or access technical systems in unintended ways”.

The agreement was signed by Trump; Google chief Sundar Pichai; Anthropic chief Dario Amodei; Mark Zuckerberg of Meta; OpenAI president Greg Brockman; Elon Musk of SpaceX and Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang.

“In a way, it is almost like a constitution,” Trump said.

“And the most important people in the world signed it, and I signed it as president.”

Trump added that he will create a board to oversee the safety of AI tools.

However, he did not specify who would be part of that board.

Zuckerberg stressed that the agreement gives “the American people and customers the confidence that the technology works” as intended, calling the meeting a “historic conversation”.

And Amodei called it a way “to win safely”, referring to the president’s comment earlier this month that “whoever wins AI, wins”.

But not all technology experts are impressed by the agreement, the BBC article notes, as Telegrafi reports.

The AI expert at Nanyang Technological University, Jose Miguelito Enriquez, said the pact shows “emerging consensus”, but does not address whether AI developers should be held accountable for incidents.

Besides him, law professor Kimberlee Weatherall from the University of Sydney also thinks it is “deeply unimpressive” and comes despite calls from some world leaders and industry figures for stricter regulations around the technology.

The agreement appears to allow firms to “define what counts as safety” and does not set out what consequences there are for any violation, Weatherall underlines.

But why is Trump fully on board with AI despite the warnings – and why are there concerns that AI could threaten humanity, and how real are they?

As the media recall, as Telegrafi reports, Trump has consistently downplayed concerns about the risks of AI in response to calls from some industry figures for stricter oversight of the technology.

On Monday, OpenAI said it had given up on publishing its latest flagship artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, because of safety concerns.

The company’s safety checks have come under strict scrutiny after high-profile incidents involving its technology, including its models entering Australian government platforms without authorization.

Jeannie Paterson from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics at the University of Melbourne said self-regulation could mean companies put in place “only minimal protective measures”.

The agreement inspires “very little confidence”, as recent incidents of artificial intelligence fraud suggest the companies have been undisciplined in their approach, she added.

Doubling the data centers

Trump also reiterated his support for the rapid expansion of data centers – the essential computing infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence.

The rollout of data centers has attracted backlash across the U.S. because of concerns about electricity use and their possible impact on communities.

The construction of data centers has also emerged as a potential political obstacle for Trump’s Republican Party ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November.

A poll conducted by Marist Poll in partnership with NPR and PBS News earlier this month found that 65% of registered voters opposed the construction of data centers in their areas.

Responding to these concerns, Trump said the technology companies would work to make people “happy” about the construction of data centers.

“These big, powerful, very rich and very smart companies will give massive contributions to the communities,” Trump told reporters.

The U.S. president previously said on social media that the only reason communities should oppose data centers is if they “want to end up backward and poor”.

Huang, whose company produces computer chips essential for the functioning of artificial intelligence, stressed after the meeting that data centers should be called “superintelligence factories”.

These facilities are “reindustrializing the United States”, creating jobs across the economy, he added.

Now it is ‘Superintelligence’

Also on Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order instructing U.S. government departments and agencies to start using the terms “SI” and “Superintelligence” and to no longer accept the use of the term artificial intelligence.

SI will replace AI in “official correspondence”, websites, reports and other forms of communication, the order said.

“As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not only artificial intelligence, but a new era of Superintelligence,” the order said.

During a speech at the United Nations General Assembly last week, Trump said the word “artificial” made the technology “sound fake”.

And some technology leaders, including Zuckerberg and Musk, and other people close to the president, have already begun to use the term.

With technology leaders endorsing the term, the U.S. “may be in a position to define the naming”, Paterson stressed.

But some experts said after Trump’s UN speech that they thought the term was unlikely to gain wide support because it is a name commonly used to refer to more advanced systems, as Telegrafi reports.