Six AI chiefs signed a White House safety pledge, and AI is now officially 'SI'
Six AI company leaders signed a voluntary White House safety accord with no penalties, as Trump ordered agencies to say 'SI'. What's in it.
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On 29 September, the leaders of six of the biggest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord at the White House. On the same day, President Trump signed an order telling federal agencies to stop saying "artificial intelligence" and say "super intelligence" instead.
One of those is a set of commitments. The other is a change of vocabulary. Here's what each actually does.
Who signed
The four commitments
What it doesn't have
Penalties. The accord is voluntary, and nothing in it says what happens if a company falls short. The signatories' own framing is that "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely."
That's not nothing. External auditors and board-level oversight are concrete. But a pledge with no enforcement depends entirely on the companies choosing to keep it, and how it's checked.
The "SI" order
This follows the US–China "Super Intelligence" dialogue agreed last week, where the two governments also adopted the term. Trump also said he plans a 10-person AI safety committee and an "AI czar," though those hadn't been named at the time of the announcement.
The name change has no technical meaning. Today's AI systems aren't "superintelligent" in any accepted sense. It's a choice about framing, and it's now the federal government's official vocabulary.
Same week, different message
The day after the accord was signed, the Federal Trade Commission confirmed it is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic, and METR over the risks of AI agents. So the White House is asking the industry to police itself, while a federal regulator investigates whether two of the signatories' labs kept consumers safe. Both are happening at once.
Our read
The accord matters less for what it requires than for who signed it: most of the major US AI companies, on the record, in one place. The test is the first incident after this, and whether the external auditors and board committees exist in public, not just on paper.