AI summit CEOs drove majority of US stock growth, Guardian reports
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hand-guided the drafting of a “morally binding” agreement that President Donald Trump signed with six artificial intelligence executives last Tuesday at the White House, The Guardian reported, citing Semafor. The Guardian, citing Semafor, said the pact arose from a conversation between Zuckerberg and House Speaker Mike Johnson at a U.S. state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping that preceded the White House meeting of tech executives. Zuckerberg circulated a draft of the agreement in advance of the convening, and Jensen Huang threw his support behind it, per Semafor.
The Guardian described the agreement as vague, saying it stipulates a framework for what Trump called “tremendous self-policing,” reiterating his point that AI companies can act as their own watchmen. Named signatories include Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Huang and Dario Amodei of Anthropic.
“It’s almost like a constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection,” Trump said, according to The Guardian. The newspaper noted that constitutions are famously legally binding, which the AI agreement is not.
The Guardian wrote that it is “one thing for tech executives to dine at the White House to curry favor with the president” but “entirely another to have them draft the terms of executive orders.” The newspaper characterized the situation as Silicon Valley’s CEOs “writing contracts that bear the White House letterhead, entrenching their interests and their power.”
Trump has separately decreed that government documents render any reference to “artificial intelligence” as “super intelligence,” according to The Guardian. Musk complied by renaming a SpaceX subsidiary from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. The change coincided with Musk’s re-entry into government work, more than a year after his term at the Department of Government Efficiency ended.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named Musk to a task force to study the future of warfare called Project Meridian alongside Palmer Luckey and Emil Michael, The Guardian reported. The three will release a public report in 120 days with recommendations on how to achieve “absolute technological dominance on the next-generation battlefield,” in Hegseth’s words.
Over the weekend, Trump announced he had appointed Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as AI czar, The Guardian reported. Clayton will continue to lead the U.S. intelligence community in addition to overseeing AI initiatives. The Guardian characterized the dual appointment as sending “a very different message” — one that, the newspaper wrote, “predicts an era of AI-enabled spying, of government knowledge being gathered and filtered through large language models.”
The Guardian also reported that “AI will supercharge the offensive capabilities of the US government, in particular surveillance and the gathering of intel,” and that “US spying agencies dictating global AI policy does not bode well for the sovereignty of other nations that need cutting-edge AI.”
Trump’s first AI czar, David Sacks, was a venture capitalist who served as a special government employee, The Guardian reported. According to the newspaper, Sacks championed growth and deregulation while maintaining direct financial stakes in multiple AI companies. The Guardian wrote that Sacks has “made a name for himself recently championing AI accelerationism, the opposing philosophical camp to the ‘doomerism’ of the Anthropic employees who prophesy extinction.”
The U.S. economy is already extremely dependent on the growth of the AI sector, The Guardian reported. The companies whose leaders attended Trump’s summit are responsible for the majority of the U.S. stock market’s growth over the past five years, according to the newspaper.
But the economy’s reliance on AI does not extend to the labor market, The Guardian reported. The U.S. jobs report released Friday shows that the majority of current hiring is not a result of AI company growth, with far more people being hired in healthcare, a sector the newspaper noted “still needs human labor more than automated work.” AI may fuel gross domestic product growth without driving job creation on a national scale, The Guardian wrote.
The Guardian’s concluding analysis: “The latest moves by Trump’s administration signal that American power is likewise inextricable from AI, synonymous: executive authority, military might and the government’s information.” The newspaper said the White House pledge “binds Trump and the AI CEOs together,” Hegseth’s task force “ties the Pentagon to Musk and Luckey’s visions of automated war in space,” and Clayton’s appointment “predicts an era of AI-enabled spying.” The new alliances between the White House, the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies and AI companies “loom ominously over governments and companies, particularly in Europe, that rely on American AI,” the newspaper wrote.