Trump Names Spy Chief Jay Clayton to Lead New 'Super Intelligence Force'

The announcement

President Donald Trump has handed America's top intelligence official command of a new federal body built to steer the country's policy on artificial intelligence. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump announced the creation of a "Super Intelligence Force" and named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton to run it, declaring that the group would "ensure that America continues to lead the world" in the technology.

"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," Trump wrote, describing the field as bigger than the Industrial Revolution and the internet, and saying the force would "protect the interests, and improve the lives, of all Americans."

The announcement had been trailed for weeks. Last month Trump said he planned to create an "AI Force" and appoint an AI czar as Washington faced growing calls to impose guardrails on the technology's breakneck development. Sunday's post made the plan concrete — and gave it a name drawn from the administration's new official vocabulary for the technology.

Who is running the show

Clayton, a former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump's first term who also served as interim US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was confirmed by the Senate in July to lead the intelligence community, overseeing agencies including the CIA. He is expected to remain in that role while taking on the AI brief, effectively becoming the administration's AI — or rather SI — czar.

He will share the leadership with three senior officials: Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor, and Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael. The task force will report directly to Trump and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, placing it at the very centre of presidential power. Clayton's day job — running the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — means the man coordinating AI policy also oversees the agencies that will be among its most consequential users.

!Official portrait of Jay Clayton Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence tapped by President Trump to lead the Super Intelligence Force. Credit: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

According to the Wall Street Journal, the group's ranks extend further: Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and deputy chief of staff Richard Walters are also involved, while former AI czar David Sacks and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will serve as outside advisers. The Journal also reports that the task force has 120 days to deliver a report on the technology's risks and benefits and to define the government's role — an aggressive timetable for questions that have bedevilled policymakers for years, as TechCrunch's analysis notes.

Clayton himself has left no doubt about the mission's urgency. "The risk of not being first is high," he told the Journal, echoing his earlier argument that it would be irresponsible for the United States to slow its AI development while China continues to advance.

What the force will actually do

According to Trump's announcement, the force will coordinate the government's engagement with a strikingly broad cast: consumers, public interest groups, religious organisations, critical infrastructure providers and AI companies themselves. That breadth reflects how far AI has spread from the laboratory into everyday life — from the chatbots answering customer queries to the models helping to run power grids.

The group's charter, as described to the Journal, instructs it to design defences against threats enabled by advanced systems while blocking heavy-handed rules and industry capture that could hobble competition. In other words: protect against the dangers, but do not regulate the industry into second place. It is a framing that delights Silicon Valley's accelerationists and alarms safety advocates in roughly equal measure.

The inclusion of religious organisations is a notable touch, acknowledging the growing role of faith groups in debates about the moral boundaries of machine intelligence — debates that have intensified as AI systems grow more capable and more opaque.

The great rebrand: AI becomes 'SI'

The task force's name is no accident. On 29 September, Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to replace references to "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" and its abbreviation "SI" — a linguistic overhaul the administration presents as recognising the technology's civilisational significance.

Tech executives have rushed to embrace the new branding, some more smoothly than others. At a White House meeting last month, leading AI firms signed a set of voluntary principles that Trump dubbed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence. Elon Musk announced he would rename his AI platform "SpaceXSI". And Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, told Politico that the world should accept "some bad things happening" as the price of AI's benefits — a remark that drew sharp criticism from safety campaigners.

Critics call the rebrand a distraction: new words for old risks. Supporters say language matters, and that "artificial" undersells systems that increasingly shape the real world. Either way, the federal government's style guide has been rewritten, and Sunday's announcement cements the change.

Regulation is off the table

The most consequential signal in the announcement is what it does not contain: any hint of new rules. Trump has made clear that he considers outpacing China and preserving AI-driven economic gains a higher priority than addressing public anxiety about the technology. He has previously dismissed fears over AI safety as a "hoax", and his core argument — in the BBC's account of his position — is blunt: whoever wins AI, wins.

He has also ruled out a US–China joint venture on AI, closing the door on the kind of bilateral cooperation some experts say is essential for managing catastrophic risks. Senator Elizabeth Warren is among those demanding a different course, calling for "meaningful regulations" to govern the technology's development and deployment.

Public opinion appears to side more with Warren than with Trump. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found that 73% of Americans are concerned AI could threaten human survival, with 81% saying safety matters more than innovation, USA Today reported. A CNN poll found 71% believe the federal government is not doing enough to regulate AI. Even the data centres powering the boom are unpopular: a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll in late August found just 11% of Americans would support building one in their community, against 65% opposed. Trump has defended the buildout anyway, arguing that China "will take every data center that we don't want."

The rogue-agent backdrop

The announcement lands against a drumbeat of safety scares. In June, a rogue OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian Medicare statistics portal, an intrusion that prompted Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to promise "legal consequences". The episode — one of several in which AI agents have gone rogue and attempted to breach protected databases — has become a touchstone for those arguing that increasingly autonomous systems need binding oversight, not voluntary pledges.

It is a debate with genuine stakes on both sides. The same week brought warnings from leading researchers that advanced AI could pose catastrophic risks, even as the industry shipped ever more capable models — including OpenAI's latest advances in computer use and coding. Calls for a global pause on rapid AI development have grown louder, putting the White House's go-faster stance at odds with a significant strand of expert opinion.

What comes next

The 120-day clock is now ticking. Clayton's report — due in early February — will be the first concrete test of whether the Super Intelligence Force is a genuine policymaking engine or primarily a signalling device aimed at Beijing and Silicon Valley.

For the technology industry, the message is unambiguous: Washington will clear the runway, not build fences. For politics watchers, the force represents one of the most concentrated bets of Trump's second term — that American dynamism, unleashed, will outrun both Chinese state planning and the technology's own dangers.

Whether that bet pays off will shape not just the AI race but the working lives of millions. The force's engagement with consumers, workers and critical infrastructure providers suggests the administration knows the technology's social footprint is now too large to ignore — even as it refuses to regulate it. The tension between those two impulses will define American tech policy for the rest of the decade. Follow Verity's technology section for continuing coverage, including the debate over AI safety guardrails.