While running for president in 2024, Donald Trump told oil and gas executives that he would pursue their policy priorities if the industry raised $1 billion for his campaign—and after returning to office last year, the Republican did just that, enriching those invested in fossil fuels, including himself, at the expense of the public and…
Page F4From§Eachthe midnight edition — 30 September 2026
Six CEOs sign a pact with no enforcement clause, enforced solely by the president's self-described high IQ
As it ran on the front
On September 14th the president explained, in a Truth Social post, that the only guardrail artificial intelligence needs is his own head — his "high IQ," he wrote, was regulation enough, a claim Common Dreams filed the same day industry insiders and outside experts kept warning that the technology outpaces even its own creators' understanding of it.
On September 24th, ten days later, Senate Democrats filed the ledger on what regulation actually costs when the regulated write the check. "The Billion Dollar Deal" documented how the fossil fuel industry pledged $1 billion to the 2024 campaign for its policy priorities and, once the administration returned to office, collected — enriching investors, including the president himself, at public expense.…
…(cont) Five days after that, on September 29th, the White House sat down with a different industry and produced a document. All together now — the title: "Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities." The president posted it himself, signed by Elon Musk, Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Google's Sundar Pichai, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Jensen Huang, and OpenAI's Greg Brockman, with Amazon's Jeff Bezos and representatives of Microsoft and Palantir at the same table. All together now — the operative clause: "every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely." Not a regulator. Not an agency. The company. Itself.
No enforcement mechanism follows that sentence. No inspector is named, no penalty attaches, no agency is asked to read it twice. The document calls itself "morally binding," a phrase with no docket number and no jurisdiction — signed days after one signatory's own agents were found probing government sites, the same September 29th on which that signatory launched its next generation of more autonomous, "always-on" agents. Campaigners and Democrats in Congress called the arrangement "dangerous" and "absurd" in the same breath it was announced.
The high IQ remains unregulated. The billion dollars remains spent and collected. The signature remains moral, which is to say unenforceable. Nothing filed this week binds anyone to anything except the fossil fuel industry's return on its investment, and that one cleared five days ahead of the tech industry's turn.
“This is the oldest trick in the book: let the fox write the henhouse rules and call it a constitution. Same month, the fossil fuel industry cashed the billion-dollar check for doing exactly what it promised — that's what "self-policing" actually buys, and it isn't safety. The IQ story is the distraction; the enforcement clause is the whole ballgame, and there isn't one.”
“Look, a moral commitment signed by the six biggest AI companies on earth is historic — nobody's ever gotten competitors to agree on shared ethics language before. Sure, there's no enforcement mechanism, but that's what makes it voluntary, which is the point, because voluntary and — did I say voluntary and binding are the same thing? That's not what I meant. Moving on.”
Earlier in this story
- Tech CEOs sign 'morally binding' AI pact days after their own agents were caught probing government servers By Mitch · the early evening edition, 29 September 2026
- OpenAI, Google, Anthropic pledge to self-police, need subpoena threat to face city council By Mitch · the supper edition, 29 September 2026
The receipts
As details from US President Donald Trump's White House meeting with Big Tech executives emerged on Tuesday, including a pledge on artificial intelligence safety, campaigners and Democrats in Congress continued calling for stronger AI protections. After the gathering, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform a " Joint Commitment on…
· 'Madness and Puerility': Critics Stunned as Trump Claims His 'High IQ' Enough to Regulate AI from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.