Trump Names His Spy Chief to Run a 'Super Intelligence Force'

President Trump has chosen Jay Clayton, his director of national intelligence, to be the White House's first artificial intelligence czar, concentrating in one official a broad mandate over how the federal government responds to a technology the administration now treats as a matter of state.

Clayton will chair a new task force the White House is calling the "Super Intelligence Force," or SI, a label the president prefers to "AI." The group has 120 days to study the risks and the opportunities of advanced systems and to recommend where federal responsibility should sit, according to reporting by CNBC and CBS News.

The appointment puts an unusual amount of authority in one pair of hands. Clayton keeps his post as director of national intelligence, where he oversees 18 intelligence agencies, and takes on the AI brief alongside it. He came to Washington from markets and law enforcement rather than from machine learning: he chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission in Trump's first term and served as US attorney for the Southern District of New York. The Senate confirmed him as DNI in July.

Who sits on the force

The membership reads like a cabinet meeting. The vice chairs are the investor Emil Michael, the venture capitalist Scott Kupor, and Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson. The members include Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, per Al Jazeera.

That lineup tells you how the administration ranks the stakes. National security and economic competition come first. Consumer protection sits further down the table, and Ferguson's seat is the clearest nod to it, since the FTC has just opened a safety probe into OpenAI and Anthropic.

From a vow to a post

The move fills a gap the president opened last month, when he promised an 'AI Force' and a czar without naming anyone to it. It also follows the voluntary safety accord the White House struck with the major labs at the start of October.

Trump has been candid about where he lands on the rules. In a recent interview with TIME he said he would rather let the industry police itself, and he floated the idea of the government taking equity stakes in companies such as OpenAI or Anthropic, much as it did with Intel. A 120-day review led by a former SEC chair will test how far that preference travels once it has to be written down.

The immediate effect is modest. The force carries no new statutory powers, and Congress has twice failed to pass a federal AI law. What Clayton has instead is the president's confidence and a clock. The report is due by the end of January.