White House creates “Super Intelligence Force”: Jay Clayton to lead the AI working group, report within 120 days

The White House has created a working group to examine the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence and to recommend what role the federal government should play in overseeing the technology, the Wall Street Journal reports on Saturday, citing the group’s head, Jay Clayton — the administration’s first concrete organisational step after last week’s summit with the AI giants.

Clayton, who heads the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said he will lead the group called “Super Intelligence Force” (SI) — a name that takes President Trump’s preferred term for AI, “super intelligence”. A senior White House official told the Journal that this makes Clayton Trump’s de facto AI czar.

“The President asked for a group to be assembled that will deliver exactly what he said, that we remain the leaders in superintelligence and the interests of the American people are put first,” Clayton told the newspaper.

“The risk of not being first is high,” he added. “Not being first increases the identified and unidentified risks, especially from our adversaries.”

The group’s formation comes after the meeting Trump held on Tuesday at the White House with AI leaders — including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang — where the industry agreed on principles such as internal controls for monitoring the development of models, external reviews and board notifications, voluntary commitments that Trump hailed as the right approach. “I will never hinder the growth of the technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said on Tuesday.

According to officials, the working group will leave industry the leading role in managing risks, but will work in coordination with it to identify risks and opportunities; the report is expected within 120 days.