The leaders of six major AI companies have committed to implement stronger safeguards around the development of frontier AI systems under a voluntary agreement signed with President Donald Trump this week.
The White House Accord on Super Intelligence calls on the companies to establish internal safety controls, subject those measures to independent audits, and give their boards greater oversight of AI safety and security. The six companies are OpenAI, Google, Meta, Nvidia, xAI, and Anthropic.
A Joint Commitment on AI Governance
The joint commitment on frontier responsibilities is entirely voluntary and does not impose specific implementation deadlines on the participating companies. It comes amid growing concerns about AI safety, including warnings from executives at leading AI companies about the potential risks posed by increasingly capable frontier systems. The concerns range from potential misuse of AI for cyberattacks to the risks of deploying AI systems in sensitive areas such as chemical research, critical infrastructure, and other industries where errors or malicious use could have drastic consequences.
Trump himself has publicly pushed back against calls for stronger AI safety guardrails that could slow the development of more capable AI systems, arguing that the US needs to move quickly to maintain its lead over China in the technology. With the accord, the White House is taking an approach that puts the onus on the companies themselves to strengthen safety practices without imposing mandatory requirements, at least for the moment.
“Over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations,” the accord noted. “Regardless of whether that is required of companies, we believe that implementing these controls and audits is critical to ensuring a safe future for everyone.”
Four-Layer Oversight Framework for Frontier Labs
The accord outlines a four-part oversight framework for the participating frontier AI labs. The first calls for internal controls that monitor a model’s capabilities during training and deployment, with particular attention to risks like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats. The second calls for the creation of a dedicated internal team for ensuring those controls are functioning as intended and that problems get fixed. The third calls for an independent external auditor to separately verify the internal controls, while the fourth designates an independent board committee to oversee the process and to ensure issue resolution.
Security experts generally perceived the accord as a positive step that, however, doesn’t go far enough.
The rapid pace of AI development makes it important for governments, industry, and others to work together on standards and practices that build public trust in how the technology is used, says Ellen Boehm, senior vice president, strategy and AI innovation at Keyfactor. Rather than waiting for regulation, it’s a good idea to get companies to voluntarily put risk management, audits, and established cybersecurity practices in place as AI systems become more capable.
“Companies aren’t trying to build uncontrollable AI intentionally, and it’s hard to say that the technology will behave as intended,” Boehm says. “This accord is just a starting point. From what I’ve seen, most people will be on board to support. It’s just how we evolve from here and put actual programs in place — and will it be fast enough?” she asks.
Where the “Super Intelligence” Accord Falls Short
The problem, according to Ted Miracco, CEO of Approv, is the voluntary nature of the agreement.
“A four-layer audit structure appears reasonable, but voluntary compliance and internal board oversight amount to security theater,” he says. “Without any binding enforcement and genuinely independent technical oversight, asking tech companies to police their own super-intelligence development is essentially grading their own homework.”
Jacob Krell, senior director of secure AI solutions and cybersecurity at Suzu Labs, says the accord’s major weakness is that it allows each of the six companies to choose its own evaluation without saying anything about accreditation, method, access, scope, or publication.
“The Hugging Face investigation by Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR) and Redwood Research shows the problem,” he says. METR reviewed about 1,300 transcripts over six days, but it was OpenAI that set the investigation window, supplied the datasets, controlled infrastructure access, and could redact non-public material. METR also used GPT-5.6 Sol to process much of the material. “They documented those limits,” he says. “The work was serious. OpenAI still set the boundary.”
How effective (or not) the pact will be depends on implementation, says Aviv Nahum, co-founder and CEO at Above Security. What’s meaningful about the accord is that it recognizes AI safety cannot depend on one team grading its own work. Internal monitoring, a second layer of internal review, independent evaluation, and board oversight can all help identify problems and ensure remediation.
However, “an external audit only means something if the evaluator is genuinely independent, has enough technical access to test the system properly, and identified problems actually have to be remediated,” Nahum says. “Today the accord is voluntary, with no deadline or public reporting requirement, so there is still a large difference between agreeing to the structure and proving that the structure works.”
