President Donald Trump announced on October 4 the formation of a new Super Intelligence Force, a federal task force charged with coordinating the government's approach to artificial intelligence across agencies1,2.
Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will chair the body, effectively serving as the administration's AI czar. Three other senior officials round out the leadership: Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael at DOD, and Office of Personnel Management's Scott Kupor.
From 'AI Force' to 'Super Intelligence Force'
The task force follows an executive order Trump signed earlier seeking to rebrand AI as "super intelligence". In September, Trump said he would form an "AI Force" and appoint an AI czar, specifying that "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!". The final name aligns with the rebranding effort, which tech executives gathered at the White House this week appeared to adopt when signing a non-binding safety pledge.
"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," Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Safety debate as backdrop
Trump has characterized the AI safety debate as "a hoax created by 'Radical Left Dumocrats,'" according to TechCrunch, yet the new task force is itself a response to that debate. The announcement lands in a week that saw OpenAI's safety-reports lead David Robinson resign, calling the company's culture "broken"[1], and days after Anthropic flagged Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 as an exploit-capable frontier model released without effective safeguards[2]. State legislatures have also been moving to fill a federal vacuum on AI regulation[3].
ANALYSIS Placing the task force under the Director of National Intelligence, rather than a commerce or technology agency, centers national-security equities in the federal AI coordination structure. The inclusion of the FTC chair and the DOD undersecretary spans enforcement and defense research, while OPM's presence ties workforce policy into the mix.
The composition draws from agencies with distinct mandates, and the practical scope of the body's authority will depend on whether it carries binding directive power or functions as a coordinating council.