Trump taps DNI Jay Clayton as ‘AI czar’ and launches the ‘Super Intelligence Force’
NBC News ● Covered by 9 sources
Trump set up a new AI task force and put intelligence chief Jay Clayton in charge. It’s his latest move on AI after meeting top tech bosses and brushing off bigger regulation.
Based on reporting by NBC News — read the original for the full story.
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President Donald Trump said Sunday that he is creating an artificial intelligence task force and putting National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton at the top of it. The group will also include Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and Trump said it will report to him and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
He framed the move as a follow-up to what he called the “Historic White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” a phrase he used in a Truth Social post to describe the tech summit he held this week. Trump met Tuesday with several industry figures, including Anthropic chief Dario Amodei, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. Clayton was there too.
That meeting came as AI leaders have been warning about the technology’s worst-case risks, while Trump has mostly waved off that kind of talk. He has also said he won’t regulate the industry, even as the companies themselves have been pressing Washington to step in. After the summit, Trump said the group had reached what looked like a nonbinding agreement on “tremendous self-regulation.”
The new task force is meant to coordinate the federal government’s engagement with consumers, public interest groups, religious organizations, critical infrastructure providers and “super intelligence companies,” according to Trump’s post. It also confirms a shift in how he is handling the AI debate: less about formal rules, more about bringing the biggest players into the room and calling that policy.
NBC News reported Friday that Clayton was expected to get the AI czar role. Before leading the intelligence community, he was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. The post had been held by venture capitalist David Sacks, who stepped down when his term as a special government employee expired.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic Washington-by-press-release: announce a force, sprinkle in big names, call it coordination. The real message is that Trump prefers clubby self-regulation over actual rules, which is exactly how you end up with a lot of talk and very little guardrail. Meanwhile, the AI companies get the nicest possible version of oversight: themselves.
Read more about this at: NBC News
