Shall we call it a “gentleman’s agreement”? President Donald Trump gathered the most powerful people in artificial intelligence at the White House on Tuesday and emerged with a piece of paper. The voluntary accord, announced after a luncheon, commits the industry to police itself. Trump called it “almost like a constitution.” Asked whether it actually binds anyone, he said it is “morally” binding. Sure, Jan.

The signatories read like a who’s who of the boom: Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, according to the text published by the Washington Examiner. Jeff Bezos, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Microsoft's Satya Nadella attended, though they don’t appear on that list. Sam Altman apparently skipped it.

What they agreed to is four "layers of controls and audits", internal monitoring during training and deployment, an internal oversight team, an independent external auditor and a board committee reviewing those reports. No government regulator touches any of it. There’s no enforcement, no requirement to publish findings, and companies pick their own evaluators. The Guardian noted the obvious: this is the industry grading its own homework.

Trump also signed an executive order telling federal agencies to say “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence”. But we all know this attempt at a rebrand won’t stick. He floated a 10-person oversight committee with no named members and no stated authority, and said he’s days away from naming an AI czar to replace the departing Sriram Krishnan. But this is anything but super.

The Supreme Court just cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume deporting people to countries that aren’t their own, without first letting them argue what might happen to them there. The justices granted the Justice Department’s request to pause a lower-court ruling blocking the policy. The three liberal justices dissented.

Since the policy was implemented last year, more than 25,000 people have been deported to 29 countries, according to a tally by human rights groups cited by The Guardian. The vast majority went to Mexico. Others were sent to Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia and the Central African Republic. Some went to South Sudan, a country the State Department tells Americans to avoid outright, citing crime, kidnapping and armed conflict. That’s the crux of the legal fight: whether someone facing removal gets a hearing to show the harm waiting on the other end, or whether the government can put them on the plane first and sort it out later.

The court agreed to hear arguments in December, with a formal ruling to follow. Until then, the policy stands. What the justices haven’t offered is any written reasoning—no explanation from the majority, none from the dissenters. Thousands of removals proceed in the meantime, on the strength of an order nobody has bothered to justify in writing.

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Consumer confidence just fell off a shelf. The Conference Board’s index dropped 6.7 points in September to 81.9, down from 88.6 in August. This is the lowest reading since April 2014, and below the pandemic low. That’s … bleak.

The present situation gauge slid to 109.3 and the short-term outlook sank to 63.6, per PBS NewsHour. Chief economist Dana Peterson said views of current business conditions turned negative for the first time since September 2024. Survey write-ins kept circling the same complaint: what things cost. Gas is averaging $4.46 a gallon, the CPI is up 3.4% year-over-year and wages rose just 3.1%—the weakest since May 2021. Do that math at the pump.

Two data points land next: August PCE and the September jobs report. Midterms are roughly a month out, and confidence numbers like these tend to show up in voting booths way before they show up in spending.