Trump hands AI oversight to his intelligence chief
The new "Super Intelligence Force" puts the Director of National Intelligence, the FTC chair and a Pentagon research chief in one room. No rules, powers or deadlines have been published.
Donald Trump says he has set up a task force on artificial intelligence, to be led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton.
He announced it in a post on Sunday, calling it the "Super Intelligence Force".
Two other names were given. Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and Emil Michael, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, will also sit on it.
That trio is the most useful thing a founder has to go on. Oversight of American AI now runs through the intelligence service, the consumer protection and competition regulator, and the Pentagon's research arm at the same time.
Trump said the body will work to keep the United States leading in the technology's development, and will coordinate the federal government's dealings with the public.
The sequence matters. Trump said last week he would create a board to oversee AI safety, after technology executives signed what he described as a "morally binding" pact to regulate the technology.
That pact was signed on 29 September. According to the signatures, it includes executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX and Google.
On the same day Trump signed an executive order renaming AI as "super intelligence". He had previously said the word artificial made the technology sound "fake".
Some experts have questioned the rebranding, on the grounds that "super intelligence" already describes more advanced systems and the switch invites confusion.
Some executives have adopted it anyway. Elon Musk said on social media that his firm's AI platform SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI. Musk has recently been brought back into the US government as part of a project studying the future of war.
Until last week, Trump had dismissed calls for stronger oversight and largely left AI companies to regulate themselves. The pressure to tighten the rules came from inside the industry.
For a founder, nothing has yet changed on paper. No statutory powers, reporting duties, procurement conditions or export controls have been published, and no timetable has been set for any.
What has changed is who will be in the room when they are. A start-up selling model access to a federal buyer should expect its counterparty's questions to be shaped by an intelligence chief and a defence research office rather than by a civilian technology agency.
The practical step is unglamorous: find out whether the pact signed on 29 September creates any expectation your company is assumed to have accepted, and whose name is on it.