Mark Zuckerberg sat at the center of last month’s White House meeting on artificial intelligence, with the chief executives of some of the world’s largest technology companies signing a safety accord he had drafted for the industry.
“I don’t think anything like this has come before,” Mr. Zuckerberg said outside the White House afterward, calling the gathering historic. The accord commits the companies to “self-police” the gravest safety risks of their products, and it is the most visible sign of a turnaround that has made the Meta chief executive, once a White House villain, among the most influential technology voices in Washington, CNN reported.
After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Mr. Zuckerberg’s company suspended Mr. Trump from Facebook and Instagram, and the president responded with fury, accusing Mr. Zuckerberg of plotting against him and threatening him with “life in prison.” “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Mr. Trump warned on Truth Social in July 2024. Days later came the assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. Mr. Zuckerberg said that watching the bloodied candidate pump his fist “is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.” Weeks after that, Mr. Trump said he liked Mr. Zuckerberg “much better now.”
The courtship of the president-elect was, by CNN’s account, deeply intentional. Mr. Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago within weeks of the election. Meta gave $1 million to the inauguration, which earned its chief a prominent seat on the dais, and was one of the first major funders of Mr. Trump’s White House ballroom project. Last year the company settled Mr. Trump’s lawsuit over the suspension for roughly $25 million, most of it headed for his future presidential library. Mr. Zuckerberg put a longtime Republican operative, Joel Kaplan, in charge of Washington relations, rolled back moderation rules conservatives had called censorship, and hired Dina Powell McCormick, a former deputy national security adviser married to Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, as Meta’s president. “I said, ‘how did he think of that one?’ That was a good move, he’s very smart,” Mr. Trump said of her hiring at a speech on AI last week.
It has paid off. When the Senate Judiciary Committee moved this summer to summon technology chiefs to testify on youth safety, the White House intervened, and the panel’s chairman, Senator Charles E. Grassley, shifted to seeking testimony from Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, instead, according to two people familiar with the matter. The hearing has been rescheduled more than once and has no set date. Over the summer Mr. Zuckerberg also personally counseled Mr. Trump against a proposal backed by Google’s AI chief, Demis Hassabis, for an independent AI regulator.
At the state dinner for the Chinese leader last month, Mr. Zuckerberg used his seat beside Speaker Mike Johnson to work through what the coming White House meeting should produce. The draft accord grew out of a conversation with Nvidia’s chief, Jensen Huang, and the group settled its wording around a table in the East Room, Mr. Zuckerberg beside Mr. Huang beside the president. The text came together so quickly that the word “United States” was misspelled in the copy Mr. Trump later posted online.
The access arrives as Meta fights for its place in a chaotic, hungry industry and faces a reckoning over children’s safety, after two court losses and a settlement over claims that it knowingly built addictive, harmful platforms. Katie Harbath, a former public policy director at Meta, said Mr. Zuckerberg watched Elon Musk make “a high-risk, high-reward decision” in backing Mr. Trump and decided he would need “that same sort of influence,” which meant repairing relations. One person familiar with the dynamics called him “a political chameleon” and “a survivor in terms of his relationships in DC.” Mr. Trump, attentive to appearances, has approvingly noted the change from slender hoodie-wearer to muscular jiu-jitsu practitioner; Mr. Zuckerberg watched a UFC bout with him on the White House lawn in June.
After the meeting, Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Zuckerberg forward to explain what the group had signed, saying the Meta chief “had a view that was, I thought, really right down, right down the middle.” Mr. Zuckerberg framed the accord as a way to give Americans “confidence the technology works in the way that we intend.”