AI founders embrace Trump’s hands-off safety policy

San Francisco’s Tech Week drew venture capitalists and AI founders who praised the Trump administration’s move away from federal oversight and toward industry self-policing. Trump recently hosted tech executives in Washington for a luncheon and ceremonial signing of a voluntary safety pact around “Super Intelligence,” his administration’s preferred term for AI.

The 308-word agreement says advanced AI labs should follow safety protocols and create internal teams to monitor their own work, but critics said it lacks clear enforcement. At a San Francisco event organized as part of Andreessen Horowitz’s popup programming, PitchBook’s Kyle Stanford pointed to $1 trillion in U.S. defense spending and said $13.5 billion would go to autonomous systems and AI, calling defense tech a major investment opportunity.

Safety concerns continued to build. Three OpenAI researchers said they had been fired after raising concerns that unclear rules hindered safety work, while former OpenAI safety leader David Robinson warned that voluntary commitments are no substitute for law. The White House agreement was signed by representatives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, SpaceXAI and Nvidia.

The Trump administration has repealed Biden-era AI safeguards, canceled requirements for developers to share safety test results with the federal government and sought to block state-level rules. Civil liberties groups, consumer advocates and some members of Congress continue to push for stronger oversight.