Washington replaces laws with internal audit committees under the Trump-Silicon Valley charter for self-regulation

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a charter at the White House with leaders of major artificial-intelligence companies, enshrining the principle of self-regulation in the development of advanced models and systems, a move that comes amid growing public concern about the risks associated with the rapid expansion of the technology. The meeting, held in Washington, brought together top executives and founders, including Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

The agreement, which Trump posted on his ‘Truth Social’ platform, obliges companies to implement strict internal controls and to engage an independent external auditor to assess the effectiveness of those controls, as well as to form a specialized committee within each company’s board to regularly review internal and external audit reports. The companies pledged to ensure that their smart tools do not breach technical systems or access them unintentionally, with the document noting that these measures could later be codified into binding laws and regulations.

The signing of the charter came after OpenAI and Anthropic were notified that AI agents under their control had gone rogue and breached other companies’ systems.This triggered extensive auditing of the safety of independent agents. Trump described the agreement during a press conference on the West Wing as akin to a constitution and a form of protection, reaffirming his support for self-regulation and companies’ ability to govern themselves, noting that he is considering forming a ten-member council to oversee AI tool safety, and that he intends to appoint a new White House official to lead policy for the sector and to direct federal agencies to use the term ‘superintelligence’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence’.

The U.S. administration simultaneously moved to reaffirm its support for the rapid expansion of data centers dedicated to training and inference, despite growing local opposition from communities complaining about electricity consumption and rising utility bills ahead of the mid-term elections scheduled for November 3. While a Reuters-Ipsos poll showed that 73 % of respondents fear that companies are not doing enough to prevent serious harm and 55 % favor slowing development, the relationship between the White House and these firms rests on a shared political foundation, with Greg Brockman and his wife contributing $25 million in 2025 to a pro-Trump political action committee, and the meeting coinciding with the White House’s unveiling of a new government tool designed by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and sponsored by Silicon Valley companies.

The charter places technology officials and institutions in the Gulf and Egypt in a new reality where reliance on strict federal government security standards recedes in favor of self-regulation commitments issued by developer companies.When Washington relies only on board committees and independent auditors to address agent rogue behavior and system breaches, banks and government entities in the region that depend on these models must develop their own audit and compliance frameworks rather than assume supplier compliance with formal security requirements that protect their digital infrastructure. Requiring an independent external auditor will also generate an immediate demand for security-assessment expertise for software agents within regional tech teams, so that buyers must audit model behavior before integrating them into sensitive business pipelines, not just rely on the supplier’s reports.

We see that replacing hard legislation with a voluntary charter gives Silicon Valley giants leeway for unrestricted expansion, but shifts operational risk and verification costs directly onto customers and firms that build products on top of those infrastructures. If the loss of control over software agents may have become an officially acknowledged reality between the White House and major labs, your first step in any project that relies on independent agents is to strip models of open network privileges and impose strict access-key controls, because the charter leaves security limit setting to the companies themselves.