Trump Creates The ‘Super Intelligence Force’: Jay Clayton Is Tapped to Lead The New AI Push.

President Donald Trump has unveiled a new federal task force that will coordinate his administration's approach to artificial intelligence, putting his national intelligence director at the helm.

Trump announced Sunday that Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will lead what the president is calling the "Super Intelligence Force," or SIF, following a White House gathering last week with some of the most powerful executives in the technology industry.

The group will also include Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor and Emil Michael, the Pentagon's undersecretary for research and engineering. It will report directly to Trump and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

"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 on Truth Social, describing the technology as potentially more consequential than the Industrial Revolution and the internet.

The administration has recently begun using "Super Intelligence," or SI, in place of artificial intelligence in federal communications. Trump signed an executive order last week directing executive branch agencies to adopt the terminology, although "superintelligence" traditionally has a different meaning in the technology world, referring to a hypothetical system whose intellectual capabilities surpass those of humans.

Clayton's selection also places a national security official in charge of coordinating the administration's AI strategy. Before becoming director of national intelligence in August, Clayton served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and, during Trump's first administration, as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The announcement comes days after Trump convened technology executives at the White House, including leaders from Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, xAI, Google and OpenAI, amid intensifying concerns over the speed at which increasingly powerful AI models are being developed.

That meeting produced the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, a voluntary agreement under which participating companies committed to four layers of safeguards. Those include internal monitoring of models for cybersecurity, biological and chemical threats, dedicated internal oversight teams, independent external evaluations and board-level oversight.

The accord, however, does not impose legally enforceable requirements or penalties. Trump described the arrangement as "morally binding" and has emphasized industry self-regulation rather than broad new federal rules. The document itself leaves open the possibility that some safeguards could eventually be incorporated into laws or regulations.

Some technology executives and researchers have called for stronger federal safeguards as models become more capable, while others have warned that aggressive regulation could slow U.S. development and give China an advantage. In Congress, lawmakers have introduced competing proposals ranging from transparency requirements to far more sweeping restrictions on advanced AI development.

States are also moving independently with California, home to many of the world's largest AI companies, has emerged as a major battleground over whether state governments should impose safety requirements when Washington does not.