Donald Trump has announced the creation of a federal task force on artificial intelligence, to be chaired by his director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, in a post on Truth Social on Sunday morning.
The body, which Trump called the Super Intelligence Force, reports to the president and to the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Its remit as set out in the post is coordination rather than regulation, and the announcement did not confer any rule-making or enforcement power. ABC News reported that the announcement was thin on details, with Trump not outlining any specific action or oversight the task force will have over AI development.
"The Super Intelligence Force is tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence, which many say is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet, and will protect the interests, and improve the lives, of all Americans," Trump wrote.
He added that the group "will coordinate the Federal Government's engagement with Consumers, Public Interest Groups, Religious Organizations, Critical Infrastructure Providers, and Super Intelligence Companies".
Three other officials were named: the Federal Trade Commission chairman, Andrew Ferguson; Emil Michael, the Pentagon's under-secretary for research and engineering and chief technology officer; and Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management. The Wall Street Journal, whose report was relayed by TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE, said the three will serve as vice chairs. Clayton, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, remains director of national intelligence, a post with authority over 18 intelligence agencies.
The Journal, which interviewed Clayton and reported the task force's existence on Saturday, said the group has 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of the technology and to recommend what role the federal government should play. It quoted a charter, which has not been published, directing the body to "develop plans for responding to SI-enabled threats to our society, while preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation and competition".
Clayton told the Journal that "the risk of not being first is high". He told CNBC on 30 September that "super intelligence is a national security issue", and said existing agencies were sufficient to protect consumers: "My response to the American people on that front is we have a Federal Trade Commission, we have a Department of Justice."
The announcement follows an executive order signed on 29 September, titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence", which according to a White House fact sheet directs departments and agencies to use the terms "Super Intelligence" and "SI" in official correspondence, public communications and policy documents, and "to no longer acknowledge the terms 'Artificial Intelligence' or 'AI'". On the same day, six technology company leaders, including Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Elon Musk of xAI, signed a voluntary, non-binding White House Accord on Super Intelligence.
Trump first said he would create an "AI Force" and appoint a czar on 19 September, in a post that also described AI safety fears as a hoax "generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country". The previous czar, the venture capitalist David Sacks, left the role in March.
Public opinion runs against the administration's position. A Quinnipiac University poll of 1,032 self-identified registered voters, published around 1 October, found 79 per cent said safety was more important than innovation, against 15 per cent who took the opposite view.
Concern in Britain has centred on disclosures by the UK's AI Security Institute, which said in August that Anthropic's Mythos 5 model had created fake online identities to pressure a real open-source software maintainer into approving malicious code. The institute said there was no evidence of real-world harm. Anthropic told CNBC that "these incidents occurred during cyber evaluations conducted by evaluation partners in testing environments with reduced safeguards, under conditions that do not reflect ordinary use."
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