Why are the tech lords so bad at signing their names?

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

(CNN) — When the biggest names in the artificial intelligence industry signed a voluntary safety pact alongside President Donald Trump last week, their signatures on the agreement made as much of a stir as their willingness to call AI “super intelligence” did.

On the left side of the signature page, near the midpoint, stood the rhythmic Sharpied peaks and zigzag of Trump’s name: the stylized, well-rehearsed autograph of a proud public performer. Over to the right, where the half-dozen tech leaders had signed on, things looked considerably more chaotic and peculiar.

The column began with Google’s Sundar Pichai, who set down a fluid stroke, embellished with two horizontal lines, two dots and a dash. It ended with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang signing his name with tall, swooping capital letters in a right slant.

The signatures in between were less elegant. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and xAI’s Elon Musk scrawled their names in erratic cursive. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg opened with a clumsy “m” and wobbled into an abstract finishing flourish. OpenAI president Greg Brockman, meanwhile, mustered a shaky, printed “gdb.”

The signatories had a collective net worth estimated at more than $1.5 trillion. What to make of the fact that men who aim to control the future appear to have the handwriting of middle school boys signing a classmate’s yearbook? What, if anything, does the seemingly awkward way they wield a pen suggest about the way they might wield their power and influence?

Some handwriting experts wondered whether a lack of panache in penmanship was generational.

Jessie Nucifora, co-president of the New York–based nonprofit Society of Scribes, pointed to the president’s distinctive sign-off as an example. Trump, at 80, is the oldest of all the signatories, followed by Huang, Musk and Pichai, in their 50s and 60s. Zuckerberg and Amodei are in their early 40s. Brockman, 38, is the youngest.

“If you look at Donald Trump’s signature, it’s very elaborate and intricate,” she said. “And then I feel like the younger they get, the less they’re caring.”

Kelli Fetter, owner and founder of the tutoring service Handwriting Solutions, wrote in an email that the tech leaders with the clumsier signatures “are possibly of the generation that never learned cursive, or at least not to the extent of achieving automaticity.”

“Without learning cursive, people aren’t sure how to sign their name,” Laura Ng, co-president of the Society of Scribes, added. “They just print it.”

Before the introduction of the typewriter in the late 20th century, handwriting was primarily a standardized business skill, rather than an avenue for personal expression, said Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian and author of “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History.” Because contracts, bookkeeping ledgers and correspondences were written by hand, Thornton said people learned to write in uniform handwriting styles — the flowy, thick and thin strokes of roundhand; the graceful flourishes of Spencerian script; and the simplified Palmer Method, to name a few.

Signatures, meanwhile, were distinctive. In the medieval and early modern eras, they were more akin to sophisticated monograms, one retired medieval literature professor, who asked not to be named in the story, wrote in an email. Writers would deliberately distort certain letters to convey their identities to close confidantes and obscure them from others.

Some modern signatures still bear these qualities, he added.

“The president’s famous scrawl is an obvious example, as are Pichai’s, Zuckerberg’s, and Huang’s signatures, reduced to excerpted pen strokes deliberately fused together,” he wrote. “All of them show signs of formal practice to reproduce a stamp-like image.” Zuckerberg’s, he wrote, “actually ends with what might pass for an early modern Secretary Hand pen flourish of the sort used to make counterfeiting more difficult.”

Pichai’s signature followed a format common in Europe, Ng said, with a first and last initial, a squiggle for the last name and an underline.

For much of history, only notable figures were expected to have stylized signatures, Thornton said. Napoleon Bonaparte signed his name with strong, angular lines and dramatic flourishes. And John Hancock’s grand, ornate signature on the Declaration of Independence became so famous that his name is now a term for signatures in general.

By the 1800s, Thornton said, the public had grown fascinated with the signatures of notable men and women. Publishers sold albums of facsimile autographs, and the interest developed into the field of graphology, the practice of analyzing a person’s handwriting to purportedly discern personality traits. In the late 1800s and the 1900s, as the forces of conformity and anonymity bore down on urban life, Thornton said everyday people began adding flair to their own signatures, too.

Most of the tech leaders do not seem to be trying to impress anyone with their style. In the literature professor’s estimation, “Brockman’s lower-case initials are a modest compromise between bare legibility and obscurity,” while “Amodei and Musk reproduce a kind of approximation of their names’ characters in script that appears fatigued and careless.”

Brockman, Amodei and Musk’s signatures, he added, resembled those he saw among high schoolers in the ’60s — “usually a sign that they were tired and had little respect for the document they were signing.”

Beyond aesthetics, is there anything to be gleaned from Huang’s large, looping capitals or from Brockman’s wobbly lowercase initials? Psychologists and handwriting historians alike are skeptical of the field of graphology, but those who specialize in the discipline did offer some thoughts.

Emma Bache, a UK-based graphologist, said that Brockman’s hesitant strokes indicated impulsiveness, while Sheila Lowe, president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation, wrote in her organization’s newsletter that it signals “he is quick to get to the bottom line, cutting away all the non-essentials.”

Meanwhile, Bache said the lower zone loops of Huang’s signature indicate that “he could be quite charismatic on the outside, but quite ruthless inside,” while Lowe said it signaled “a strong attachment to the past, as well as a desire to include as many associates and friends as possible in his vast number of activities.” Zuckerberg’s loops, meanwhile, reflect a sense of childlike confidence, according to Bache, and a need to push forward, according to Lowe.

The disproportionally tall capitals in Musk’s signature, Lowe wrote, are the sign of “an emotionally underdeveloped writer who has a great deal of pride in his achievements.” Bache said the large letters convey creative and forward thinking.

And Amodei, according to Bache, is an overthinker and a worrier, while Pichai is a highly intelligent strategist.

Signatures aside, the AI safety accord raised plenty of other questions — about the lack of accountability and the integrity of the document itself. The pact was not signed in public, and its low-resolution format made it difficult to ascertain whether the document was signed in ink or electronically or whether existing digital signatures were merely affixed to the document, said Jennifer Naso, a forensic document examiner.

The document also does not include a date or any official government insignia that would establish a relationship between page one and page two, she said. “This is an official White House document and agreement. You would expect to have the letterhead,” she said. “This looks like someone just typed it out on Word and printed it from their own computer.”

The signatures of these AI leaders might not reveal much about their intentions or their motivations. But the glaring typographical error under Trump’s name that labeled him President of the “Unites States” is plenty illuminating, the retired professor wrote.

“In the end, the fact that all of them signed a document they had presumably held in their hands at arm’s length but had not read closely enough to distinguish ‘Unites’ from ‘United’ says a lot more about the whole thing,” he concluded.

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