President Trump named intelligence chief Jay Clayton his AI czar and gave him 120 days to weigh the technology’s pros and cons, brushing aside Democrat calls for heavier regulation.
In Washington, the president put Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton in charge of a new Super Intelligence Force and ordered a hard look at both the promise and the hazards of the technology. Clayton will lead the effort and deliver his report on a fixed clock.
The New York Post reported that Trump is resisting a Capitol Hill push, strongest among Democrats, for tighter controls after public anxiety spiked. The White House is betting on American lead-time, industry self-policing, and a force that can plan for real threats without choking innovation.
Clayton framed the assignment in plain terms. Speed matters. Falling behind does not.
"The risk of not being first is high. 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."
He told the Wall Street Journal the president wanted a group that would keep the United States first in super intelligence and put American interests first. Clayton also said he expects stronger safeguards to emerge over time through dialogue, the way other industries handle risk.
The Super Intelligence Force is not a press-release committee. Its roster 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.
Breitbart reported that the leadership circle also takes in FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael, and OPM Director Scott Kupor. Those officials report to the president and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The structure puts national-security, market, and workforce levers in the same room.
Trump described the mission on Truth Social. The force will coordinate the federal government so America keeps leading in super intelligence, technology he and others rank bigger than the industrial revolution and the internet, while protecting American interests and improving American lives.
"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."
The force charter, as described in the reporting, calls for ways to blunt AI risks and plans for super-intelligence-enabled threats to society. It also draws a bright line against overregulation and regulatory capture that would freeze innovation and competition.
Last week Trump hosted top AI company chiefs. They signed the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” agreeing to general principles on how the technology should develop.
Executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, and SpaceX backed voluntary safety standards. Those commitments include multi-layer controls and audits plus regular meetings on best practices. Trump said he was seeing serious self-policing and that the companies understand they have to police themselves.
At the gathering he drew a hard boundary on growth.
"I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution."
He has pushed to rebrand the field as “super intelligence,” or SI, and has rejected heavier regulation as a gift to Beijing. In his view, choking U.S. development would hand the advantage to China while America argues with itself.
The political pressure did not appear from nowhere. A wave of polls has tracked public skepticism about AI. Last month a researcher at Anthropic quit and warned that the technology could lead to human extinction, saying industry leaders knew the danger and worried about it.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have both called for a slowdown in development. Those alarms fed a chorus on Capitol Hill, especially from Democrats, for more federal rules. Trump’s answer was the opposite: keep building, keep the lead, and build the guardrails without surrendering the race.
Clayton’s dual role matters here. He already sits atop the intelligence community. Putting the same person over the Super Intelligence Force ties the commercial sprint to the national-security picture instead of treating them as separate files.
Fox News reported that Trump nominated Clayton, former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, former head of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to serve as permanent Director of National Intelligence and as a Cabinet member. That résumé mixes capital-markets oversight with big-case prosecution, a useful mix for a technology that will reshape money, security, and power at once.
The 120-day clock is the practical next step. Clayton must map the upside and the downside, then put that assessment in front of the president. The force is already charged with coordinating agencies, industry, and safety work so the United States does not trade first place for a false sense of caution.
Clayton has said mechanisms to cut risk and spot opportunity will grow through industry dialogue. The accord’s voluntary audits and recurring best-practices sessions are the first test of whether that model holds.
America does not win the next industrial revolution by letting rivals set the pace while Washington writes rules for a race it is already losing. Clayton now has four months to show how the United States stays first, and keeps the benefits here at home.
