US President Donald Trump on Sunday named Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, to lead a new government task force on artificial intelligence, which he calls the "Super Intelligence Force" (SIF). Clayton, who oversees the country's 18 intelligence agencies, will become the second person to hold the informal title of White House AI czar, after venture capitalist David Sacks.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the task force would coordinate federal efforts "to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence" and would protect the interests of Americans. It will reach out to consumers, public interest groups, religious organizations, critical infrastructure providers and AI companies. Other members include Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer; and Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management. The group will report to Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The term "super intelligence" reflects Trump's effort to rebrand AI: an executive order signed on September 29 instructs the executive branch to use "SI" instead of "AI". Elon Musk responded by saying he was renaming his company's AI unit from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.
Clayton is a longtime Wall Street lawyer who represented Goldman Sachs during the 2008 financial crisis. He chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump's first term and later served as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan. He has no background in the technology industry. At his Senate confirmation hearing he described AI as both a "gamechanger" and a "threat". He told the Wall Street Journal that "the risk of not being first is high", arguing that US leadership would better equip the country to handle risks, especially from adversaries such as China.
The appointment follows a White House event last week at which executives from Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia signed an accord on frontier AI safety. It commits companies to internal controls, safety teams, independent external auditors and board-level committees. Trump called the pact "morally binding", but it contains no penalties and is not legally enforceable, and critics say it amounts to self-policing.
Pressure for action is growing. Researchers have warned about AI systems going rogue, including incidents involving OpenAI's autonomous systems, among them a July breach of Hugging Face, a platform for sharing AI models. Australia's prime minister has said an OpenAI agent hacked the country's healthcare platform. Lawmakers in Washington face voter concerns about job losses and social disruption. Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, cautiously welcomed Clayton's appointment. He noted, however, that the administration has resisted meaningful safeguards without offering a serious alternative for addressing national security risks from powerful AI.
The move matters because it places AI policy under a national security official at a time when the administration says it wants to stay ahead of China while it faces growing questions about how much oversight the technology needs.