Trump names the four leaders of the ‘Super Intelligence Force’: Jay Clayton, Andrew Ferguson, Scott Kupor and Emil Michael

American President Donald Trump on Sunday appointed the Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, and three other officials to lead the “Super Intelligence Force” — the new federal group charged with protecting American interests in the field of artificial intelligence, as USA Today reports. In a post on Truth Social on October 4, Trump announced that the force will be led by Clayton, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Andrew Ferguson, the director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Scott Kupor, and the Pentagon official for research and technology, Emil Michael.

This is the newest development of the initiative announced by Trump, who has described artificial intelligence as “the next Industrial Revolution, or the Internet”. According to USA Today’s reporting, the force comes a few days after the White House summit with technology leaders — including Meta director Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceX director Elon Musk — where the firms signed a joint commitment for “strong internal processes and controls, to ensure that their technology behaves as intended”.

In an October 1 interview for USA Today, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, said that “we should be concerned that hard safeguards are put in place, so that we do not see wild AI agents behaving inconsistently with human values”. Public concerns remain high: in a Quinnipiac poll published last week, 73% of Americans said they are concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten human survival, while 81% said safety is more important than innovation; a CNN poll last month found that 71% believe the federal government is not doing enough to regulate it.

Trump has defended the expansion of data centres in the U.S., telling reporters on September 29 that China “will take every data centre that we don’t want… because this is good for China”, but stressed: “It’s good for us, and we are leading by a lot, and we will keep it that way”. The University of Massachusetts Amherst poll at the end of August found that only 11% of Americans would support building a data centre in their community, while 65% would oppose it. Speaking alongside technology leaders on September 29, Trump backed a soft regulatory approach while the technology develops: “It will be very, very safe. There is self-control, and also collective control, and it will be excellent” — as USA Today reports.