The 'Morally Binding' Mirage: Why Super Intelligence Pacts Are PR Theater
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
A new executive order and a voluntary safety agreement signal a rebranding effort for the industry, but lack the legal teeth to provide actual governance.
When President Donald Trump convened the titans of the tech industry this week, the primary output was not a regulatory framework, but a linguistic shift. By executive order, the U.S. government has officially pivoted away from the term "artificial intelligence," replacing it with "super intelligence."
Accompanying this rebranding was the "Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities," a safety pact signed by a roster of tech power brokers, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. However, as TechCrunch first reported, the agreement appears to be more of a performative gesture than a governing document.
From a policy perspective, the pact is fundamentally hollow. Sean O’Kane of TechCrunch notes that the agreement is "deeply non-binding" and "completely voluntary" from a legal standpoint. The lack of rigor is further evidenced by the fact that the document actually misspelled "United States." When questioned on the nature of the commitment, President Trump described the agreement as "morally binding," a phrasing O’Kane describes as a level of abstraction previously unheard of in policy terminology.
This shift toward "super intelligence"—and the creation of a corresponding "Super Intelligence Force"—suggests a strategic attempt to distance the technology from its current negative connotations. Kirsten Korosec of TechCrunch suggests the meeting served as a rebranding exercise designed to signal that while "AI" is perceived as a job-killing, scary force, "super intelligence" is not.
The optics of the event also highlighted the volatile nature of the administration's relationship with the industry. TechCrunch reports that Dario Amodei had recently been "in the doghouse" with the administration, a dynamic that shifted only after a 10 p.m. dinner with the president. Even then, internal government friction remains; while the Treasury Secretary is reportedly a fan of Anthropic, the Defense Department continues to view the company as a national security risk and "woke," with Emil Michael frequently criticizing the firm on X.
Ultimately, the rapid assembly of this pact—coming just weeks after President Trump claimed that regulation was unnecessary and that warnings about AI dangers were the work of "Chinese or Democratic plant[s]"—underscores its nature as theater. While the gesture of the meeting is significant, the resulting non-binding agreement is unlikely to produce any meaningful changes in how these powerful technologies are actually constrained.