WASHINGTON — President Trump has tapped Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as his new artificial-intelligence czar — and given him 120 days to report on the pros and cons of the technology.
Clayton will oversee a so-called Super Intelligence Force, which is being formed as Trump resists pressure to throttle AI development.
“The president asked that a group be put together that was going to ensure exactly what he said … [that] we stay the leaders in superintelligence and that the interests of the American people are put first,” Clayton told the Wall Street Journal about his new role.
Trump has called for rebranding AI as superintelligence, or SI.
“The risk of not being first is high,” Clayton told the outlet. “Not being first increases the identified and unidentified risks, particularly from our adversaries. Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people.”
A blizzard of polls has identified public skepticism over AI. Last month, those fears reached a fever pitch when a researcher at Anthropic quit his job, dramatically warning that the technology could lead to human extinction and that industry leaders were aware of and worried about the likelihood.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both called for a slowdown in the development of AI.
Altman highlighted the Hugging Face online-platform incident in which engineers at his firm had been training a model with some safety parameters turned off on ExploitGym, which tests hacking capabilities. The system allegedly went rogue and hacked a company on its own.
The deeply disturbing incidents led to a chorus of calls on Capitol Hill, particularly among Democrats, for greater regulation of AI, but Trump rejected that, warning such a move would be a godsend for China.
Trump held a gathering of CEOs of top AI companies last week, during which they signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” agreeing to general principles about the development of the tech.
“I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump vowed at the time.
Clayton predicted that over time, there will be stronger mechanisms to mitigate risks and identify opportunities with AI.
“I expect there will be mechanisms developed in dialogue, just like there are in other industries,” Clayton told the outlet.
The newly minted White House “Super Intelligence Force” also includes Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, White House deputy Chief of Staff Richard Walters and former AI czar David Sacks.
The group’s charter calls for creating ways to mitigate AI risks and “develop plans for responding to SI-enabled threats to our society, while preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation and competition.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, “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.”
