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Six AI labs sign superintelligence accord
What the accord requires
President Trump convened the summit on Tuesday, and the accord was worked out during it. The companies accept responsibility for the safe development of what they build. Each sets up internal controls that an internal team verifies, and external auditors then validate that those controls work.
Each company also creates an independent committee of its board to receive the auditors' reports. David Sacks, who attended the summit, described the board's duty this way: a board that receives an external auditor's report has a fiduciary duty to act on it, and ignoring one can put its directors and officers insurance at risk of cancellation. The FTC and the SEC keep the ability to enforce the companies' public commitments.
How it was written
The White House circulated a statement of a couple of paragraphs to the companies beforehand. It covered a statement of responsibility and a working group to discuss safety issues and share best practices. The internal controls, external audits, and board committee were the new parts, brought forward by Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang and settled in a breakout session of the six companies in the Roosevelt Room.
Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, read a copy of the full text aloud to the group, and the edits were light. The accord requires no new legislation and no international agreement, and Sacks said the controls can be put in place right away.
Why do boards owe fiduciary duties over oversight?
Corporate directors owe their company a duty of care and a duty of loyalty, and courts treat oversight as part of that care. A 1996 Delaware decision, In re Caremark, held that directors can be liable if they utterly fail to set up any system for monitoring the company's compliance. In 2019, the Delaware Supreme Court applied that idea in Marchand v. Barnhill to an ice cream maker whose board had no system for tracking food safety. Delaware is where a large share of big US public companies are incorporated.
How does the FTC police public promises?
Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, passed in 1914, bans unfair or deceptive practices in commerce. A company that publicly promises a safeguard and does not deliver it can be charged with deception under that section. The FTC has used this approach for decades, notably against companies that broke their own published privacy policies. The SEC works from a separate tool, the antifraud rules in the securities laws, which cover false statements to investors.
Where did outside audits of controls come from?
Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 after the accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom. Section 404 requires public companies to assess their internal controls over financial reporting, and the outside auditor must separately attest to that assessment. The structure matches the accord's: management builds the controls, and an independent party checks them. The law also created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to inspect audit firms.
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