Trump names Jay Clayton to lead the Super Intelligence Force

AI · score 7/10 · 2026-10-04

President Donald Trump announced Sunday that Jay Clayton, his director of national intelligence, will lead a new Super Intelligence Force, a task force meant to coordinate the federal government's AI efforts.

The announcement came in a Truth Social post, after media reports on Friday. The Wall Street Journal reports that Clayton will chair the force, with FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor, and Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, serving as vice chairs. Cointelegraph reports the group will answer to Trump and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

In his post, Trump said the force is "tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence." He added that "many say" the technology is "bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet."

A rebrand with a task force attached

The name is doing work. Cointelegraph reported on Sept. 20 that Trump planned an "AI Force" modeled after the Space Force, with an AI czar. Since then, Trump signed an executive order rebranding AI as "super intelligence," and tech executives gathered at the White House this week to sign a safety pledge that was non-binding and, TechCrunch notes, contained a typo. The task force name follows the new branding.

This is the same president who dismissed the AI safety debate as a hoax, then promised an AI czar anyway, adding "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!" Now the czar exists, and he is a securities lawyer. Clayton ran the SEC during Trump's first term, served as interim US attorney for the Southern District of New York, and was confirmed by the Senate in July to lead the intelligence community. Sources told CNN he is expected to keep that job while chairing the force. Two jobs, both large.

Read the charter

The task force reportedly has 120 days to produce a report on the risks and opportunities of AI. Its charter says it will "develop plans for responding to SI-enabled threats to our society, while preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation and competition."

That sentence is the whole story. The threats get half a sentence. The other half is a promise not to regulate too hard. Clayton's own comments point the same way. He has said it would be irresponsible for the US to "back away" from AI while China advances, and he told the Journal that one of the biggest risks is "not being first."

My read

I keep coming back to the staffing. The man now coordinating America's AI strategy is also running its intelligence community, and his background is securities law, not machine learning. Maybe coordination is the actual job and technical depth is beside the point. But when the charter names overregulation as something to prevent in the same breath as SI-enabled threats, the 120-day report reads as pre-written.

The pledge was non-binding and the rebrand is marketing. The task force is real, though, and its first report will show whether "super intelligence" is a policy or just a logo.