AI CEOs sign 'morally binding' pledge; FTC opens investigation into signers days later.

…(cont) On September 25th, Palm Beach County — Mar-a-Lago's own zip code — passed a data-center moratorium of its own. On September 28th, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote to FERC asking it to block the AES sale outright, warning the deal would raise electricity costs to build out more of the same infrastructure.

Then came this week's summit. $1.8 trillion in combined net worth walked into the White House and signed a pledge a CBS discussion of the event called "morally binding" — the same voluntary-policing approach The New York Times reports the Biden administration already tried. Hakeem Jeffries called it letting the fox guard the henhouse. He is not wrong; he is just late. The fox already wrote a note like this once, and enforcement did not follow it then either.

The same week the room signed, the FTC opened a file on the labs that signed it: Anthropic, OpenAI, the rest, facing demands for information and compelled testimony. Two documents now exist on the same companies, dated the same month. One asks nothing of them but a promise. The other can make them answer under oath. Congress went home for the midterms having passed neither the AI bill nor the ratepayer bill. The pledge carries no enforcement clause because none was written into it. The file at the FTC is where enforcement actually sits this month — one subpoena away from the same names on the signature page.