Unites States typo in AI pledge, and Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Pichai all sign it
An artificial intelligence accord that was unveiled by US President Donald Trump on Tuesday, and was signed by some of America's biggest tech and AI giants seems to have been published with an unusual typo. The "morally binding" accord, which pledges its signatories to strengthen internal safeguards amid growing concerns over risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems, described Trump as President of the "Unites States".
Trump had released the one-page document on his social media platform Truth Social after having met technology executives at the White House yesterday. The accord calls on participating companies to put multiple layers of controls around their AI systems, including independent audits, board-level oversight and internal monitoring of models during training and deployment.
All this being said, this accord, which carried the signatures of not just Trump, but also Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Open AI President Greg Brockman, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, has been published with quite the distinctive spelling mistake. It identifies Donald J Trump as the President, not of the United States, but of the fictional country called "Unites States". It remains unclear how such a glaring typo made it through several rounds of editing, if such rounds took place at all, and into a public pledge that, for all intents and purposes, sets the White House’s official policy on AI going forward. Even more unusual is the fact that not a single one of the document’s signatories, including some of Silicon Valley’s brightest names, appears to have spotted the error.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for instance, shared the document on X, writing that "Google has invested hundreds of billions" in the US and pledging that his company was "committed to working with other industry leaders to establish norms and build public confidence". Yet, he too appeared to miss the error.
While Trump is well known for attempting to rename buildings in the US, (such as trying to add his name to the Lincoln Center in Washington DC), trying to change the country's name may be too much of a stretch even for him. - Ends(Written by Shounak Sanyal)
