Trump's Super Intelligence Force puts the spy chief in charge of AI and tells him not to overregulate

President Donald Trump has created a federal task force called the “Super Intelligence Force” and put Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence, in charge of it. Trump announced it on Truth Social on 4 October, making Clayton the government’s AI czar. The group has 120 days to produce a report on the risks and opportunities of the technology, and its charter tells it to plan for threats while preventing overregulation. Nothing in the announcement places a new obligation on AI companies.

Who sits on the Super Intelligence Force and what it is told to do

Clayton, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, leads the group. His three vice chairs are Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, and Scott Kupor, who runs the Office of Personnel Management. SiliconANGLE reports that Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are members, that Condoleezza Rice and David Sacks, the previous AI czar, will advise, and that the group reports to Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

According to ABC News, the task force is to coordinate the federal government’s dealings with consumers, public interest groups, religious organisations, critical infrastructure operators and the AI companies, so that America keeps its lead. TechCrunch quotes the charter’s instruction to plan responses to AI-enabled threats while preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation.

The name follows an executive order Trump signed in September that replaces “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence” in federal communications. Explaining the change at the UN, he said the word artificial makes it sound fake.

Why Jay Clayton’s appointment tells you more than the charter does

The choice of chair is the real signal. Clayton has described AI as a national security matter and rejected calls to slow down. ABC News quotes him saying the risk of not being first is high. Last week he argued that existing consumer protection and product liability law already covers the harm targeted by the Senate’s bill to make AI agent hacking a crime, which the administration opposes.

Put an intelligence chief in charge and AI policy becomes a question of who gets ahead of China and which threats the state must be ready for. Consumer safety and liability come second. That framing has already shaped this year: the export-control order behind the Fable 5 shutdown in June, and the government review that now comes before every frontier model release. A task force led from the intelligence community will likely produce more of the same.

Ferguson’s seat is the odd one. His FTC is preparing demands for information from OpenAI, Anthropic and the testing group METR about their own warnings, a case covered here as the FTC wanting the labs to testify. He now also sits as vice chair of a body told to guard against overregulation. Either the FTC inquiry becomes one of the task force’s tools, or the task force quietly narrows it. We will find out which in the next few months.

The case for the task force, and the case against it

A charitable reading exists. Since David Sacks left the AI czar job in March, nobody in Washington has clearly owned AI risk, and a body with the intelligence chief, the Pentagon and the consumer regulator around one table can at least write response plans for an AI-enabled cyberattack or an agent loose in government systems. A 120-day report could also recommend that Congress act. Clayton’s own argument is that the country with the strongest models will be best placed to deal with their risks, and that is a coherent position.

The case against is that the announcement contains no mechanism of any kind. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the administration has not explained whether Clayton’s role will include safety standards or reviews of the most advanced models, TechRepublic reports. Trump has called AI safety concerns a hoax. The only safety framework the White House has produced is the voluntary pact six AI chiefs signed on 30 September, which nobody can enforce.

The politics around the task force point the same way. A White House memo that Axios reported in September calls effective altruism, the movement behind much of the AI safety field, a fringe and cultish collective, and the president’s allies have made Anthropic’s Dario Amodei its face. This week the Washington Post reported that Trump’s allies are trying to sideline AI safety advocates who spent two years building influence in Washington. A task force told to avoid overregulation, set up while the safety camp is being pushed out, is unlikely to recommend binding rules.

What Washington’s choice means for European companies

For a European business, the most important consequence is that the binding rules on frontier models will keep coming from Brussels. Since 2 August the European Commission’s AI Office has had enforcement powers over providers of the most capable models, including the right to demand information and order a model withdrawn from the EU market. Nothing in Washington this week changes that, and the AI Act remains the floor your compliance work should be built on.

The second consequence is less comfortable. When AI policy is run as security policy, the availability of American models depends on decisions taken for American security reasons. The Fable 5 order showed that a live product can be switched off by Washington for weeks. If your business depends on one American model for something customers notice, have a tested fallback, ideally from a second supplier and preferably one that can run in an EU data center.

Put the report’s due date, around 1 February 2027, in the diary. It is the first point at which the task force has to say something concrete, and any recommendation on export controls, model reviews or federal preemption of state law will reach European customers of the American labs within months.