Washington's AI point man is usually a Silicon Valley name. This time Trump picked the country's top spy.
Jay Clayton, who has run the US intelligence community since July, is set to become the administration's new AI czar, according to the Wall Street Journal. He'll chair a freshly created body the White House is calling the Super Intelligence Force — SI, for short, because Trump reportedly prefers that label to "AI." The group has 120 days to study the risks and upside of the technology and recommend what role, if any, the federal government should play in steering it.
Putting an intelligence chief in charge isn't incidental. Clayton already ran the SEC during Trump's first term and worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan before that, so he knows markets and enforcement. But framing AI oversight as an intelligence-community job tells you how the White House sees the stakes. Clayton put it bluntly: "Superintelligence is a national security issue."
His vice chairs are former Uber executive Emil Michael, venture investor Scott Kupor and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson. The broader task force includes Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — less a working group than a second cabinet.
Clayton takes over from venture investor David Sacks, who stepped down as AI and crypto czar back in March. Since then, Washington has gotten a voluntary safety pact from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, plus a string of incidents — from AI agents leaking data to OpenAI pulling a model over alignment failures. The administration is still betting on voluntary standards over hard rules. Whether that bet survives will depend on what Clayton's team recommends in 120 days.
