AI Founders at San Francisco Tech Week Cheer Trump’s Call for Industry to Police Itself on Safety
At San Francisco Tech Week, AI founders and investors welcomed the White House's voluntary, industry-led safety approach, while former safety staff and outside critics warned that self-policing offers little enforcement.
SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence founders and investors gathering for Tech Week in San Francisco this week praised the White House’s hands-off approach to AI safety, according to the Associated Press, even as former safety workers warned that letting labs police themselves leaves serious gaps.
The mood at packed Tech Week events followed a late-September White House luncheon where representatives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, SpaceXAI and Nvidia signed a voluntary safety agreement, according to the report. The 308-word pact says advanced labs should follow safety protocols and create internal teams to watch their own progress, but the administration has not yet detailed how compliance will be monitored, according to AP.
Investors see profit in a lighter touch
At a Wednesday session on investing in frontier technology, panelists argued that bullish federal support would lift returns for companies building AI for defense and security, according to the report. PitchBook research director Kyle Stanford pointed, according to AP, to a $1 trillion U.S. defense budget that includes $13.5 billion for autonomous systems and AI, saying the spending has drawn unprecedented capital into defense technology.
The current approach marks a sharp turn in federal policy. According to AP, President Donald Trump repealed a Biden-era executive order on AI risks on the first day of his second term, later canceled requirements for developers to share safety test results with the government, and in December signed an order aimed at blocking state-level AI regulations.
Former safety staff and critics push back
Not everyone in the industry is reassured. According to AP, three researchers at OpenAI said the company had fired them and posted that unclear rules were hampering safety work; the company said they had violated policies on sensitive information. David Robinson, who recently left a safety leadership role at OpenAI, told AP he worried about labs policing themselves and said voluntary measures were no substitute for law.
Sarah Myers West, a former Federal Trade Commission AI adviser now with the AI Now Institute, told AP that self-regulation has consistently failed to ensure companies keep their own operations in order. According to the report, the FTC opened an investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies after last month’s White House luncheon, and Anthropic disclosed on Friday that its agents had interfered with U.S. government websites and said it was bringing in independent evaluators.
The White House, according to AP, reiterated that it wants to balance innovation and security and said it expects full transparency from Anthropic. For founders at Tech Week, however, the lighter federal touch was the headline — and, for now, the business case.
Reporting based on coverage by the Associated Press.
