The chief executives of Anthropic, Nvidia and Meta said on Tuesday that AI's promise and its dangers must be handled together, as they spoke to reporters outside the White House after signing a voluntary safety accord with US President Donald Trump.
Elon Musk of xAI, Google's Sundar Pichai and OpenAI's Greg Brockman also signed the one-page document, which commits frontier AI developers to internal controls, external audits and board-level oversight.
Amodei: 'We Can Win Safe'
Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei said the technology's benefits are large, but tied its success to safety.
"What I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefits of the technology. As the president has said. Whoever wins AI, wins," he said.
He added: "We all need to work together to make sure that we can win, and we can win safely if we do this right, if we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safe."
Huang: 'No Conflict' Between Innovation And Safety
Nvidia chief Jensen Huang called AI essential to humanity's future and rejected the idea of a trade-off.
"There's no conflict between innovation, technology and safety," he said. He said the industry would have to build new technologies to advance AI's capabilities while also creating new technologies aimed at making it safer.
Zuckerberg: Accord A 'Start'
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg outlined the framework, saying its principles centre on robust internal controls, internal risk reviews, outside auditors and evaluators, and independent review of audit reports by company boards.
He said the aim is to give Americans and customers confidence that the technology works as companies intend.
"The idea isn't that this is the only thing that we will ever do. It is that this is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to," Zuckerberg said.
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Musk And Trump
Musk said "jobs are going to change" and expects an "evolution of roles" as AI and robots spread, calling the most likely outcome "incredibly beneficial".
Trump described the meeting as "very good", "very productive" and "extremely friendly", and said the executives share a wish to make sure the world is "a safe place".
The accord is voluntary, though it says it may "make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations" over time. Critics, including Senator Mark Warner, have questioned whether self-policing is enough.
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