'We can't stifle it': Trump says AI leaders 'have to self-police' AI technology that 'will be bigger than the industrial revolution'

President Donald Trump used a White House lunch on Tuesday to make a clear promise: the federal government won’t be putting the brakes on AI. He said he would never “stifle” a technology he sees as bigger than the industrial revolution, and he cast the US as already in the lead over China. That’s a pretty loud message for a room full of executives who have, lately, been talking a lot more about safety than speed.

The meeting pulled in a heavy list of names. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella all attended, along with Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and House Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump also said he and the leaders had signed a voluntary accord with internal and external reviews of the technology, though the details were not immediately available.

That voluntary, self-policing language runs straight into the anxiety bubbling up inside the industry itself. Amodei has recently called for leading firms to slow down development. Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have also argued that safety measures need time to catch up as companies report more examples of AI agents going rogue. Huang and Zuckerberg, by contrast, have been playing down the panic and putting the burden on each company to keep its own products safe.

Altman reinforced that caution in a CNBC interview the day before, saying OpenAI is “pacing” its progress and sometimes not training a model at all. He said the company wants to make safety cases it can stand behind, not feed public anxiety. That same company had halted the rollout of a new model over safety concerns.

Trump, meanwhile, framed the whole thing as a race the US needs to win, not a science project to slow down for everyone’s comfort. He also said the executives had agreed to help calm local opposition to data centers by supporting schools or lowering energy costs, and suggested companies that can’t win that fight may end up overseas. The administration wrapped the day in the language of a coming “Golden Age,” with Trump insisting on “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence and officials pitching America.gov as a chatbot for government services, including possibly first-time passport applications online.