Last week, six of the most powerful AI companies in the world promised the White House they would let outsiders check their work.

On Sept. 29, Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI signed an accord on the most advanced AI models that U.S. President Donald Trump called "morally binding." Each company has promised it will "partner with an independent external auditor or evaluator" and have independent board members review the auditors' reports and make sure problems get fixed.

Outside audits are a good idea, and I'm glad to see them in there. But the accord says nothing about who chooses the auditors, what they can examine or whether any findings are made public; there's no penalty for ignoring it. As it stands, each company picks its own auditor and decides what that auditor gets to look at.

In 2000, Enron paid accounting firm Arthur Andersen — once part of the so-called “Big Five” of international accounting firms, now the “Big Four” after Arthur Andersen’s implosion — $25 million to audit its books and another $27 million for tax and consulting work. Within two years, both firms had collapsed. Congress responded with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which took the choice of auditor away from management, stopped auditors from selling most other services to the companies they audit and set up a public board to inspect the auditors themselves.

Andersen failed not due to a deficit in expertise, but in an incentive to look hard at a client paying it $52 million in a single year.

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