Trump Announces ‘Super Intelligence Force’ To Fight Threat He Calls ‘Hoax’

President Trump has announced the leadership of his new “Super Intelligence Force,” a small band of advisors who will report directly to the president about issues related to AI. The group will be led by the Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, who takes the helm as AI developments come at a frantic pace.Next week Meta as well as European and Chinese rivals will launch upgrades of their latest AI models on Wednesday and Thursday, expanding the capabilities and reach of a developing technology, Donald Trump has compared to the birth of the internet or the industrial revolution.Mr. Clayton, a former U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York and SEC chairman, participated in Mr. Trump’s luncheon with AI executives and experts last week, where the group signed a non-binding pledge to ensure there are robust internal safeguards to protect the public from rogue agents. At his confirmed hearing to be DNI earlier this year, Mr. Clayton said the technology has great opportunities for deployment to help people, though he concedes that AI is also a “threat.”“When something’s both an opportunity and a threat, you better get your arms around it,” Mr. Clayton told senators.Mr. Trump made the announcement of who would be part of his “Super Intelligence Force” in a Truth Social post on Sunday. Mr. Clayton’s three deputies will be the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, and the director of the Office of Personnel Management, Scott Kupor. Mr. Clayton for years worked as a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, while Messrs. Michael and Kupor both have experience working in Silicon Valley. Mr. Michael previously worked as the senior vice president of Uber while Mr. Kupor spent more than 15 years working at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.“The Super Intelligence Force is tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence, which many say is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet, and will protect the interests, and improve the lives, of all Americans,” Mr. Trump wrote. “The Super Intelligence Force will coordinate the Federal Government’s engagement with Consumers, Public Interest Groups, Religious Organizations, Critical Infrastructure Providers, and Super Intelligence Companies.”Mr. Trump’s meeting with AI executives last week concluded with a back-slapping joint press event outside of the West Wing, where the president embraced even those who may have crossed him in the past. He welcomed Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, xAI’s Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, among dozens of others involved in the AI space. “There was a lot of commonality in this room,” Mr. Trump told reporters after the lunch ended. “There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that, but the self-regulation is very important.”The document Mr. Trump and the tech leaders later signed was “morally binding,” not legally binding, the president said. The document stated that the internal controls companies create “may” become binding laws or regulations, but there is no guarantee that such a thing will happen. Mr. Clayton, a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney by trade, said during his confirmation hearing that AI will help “greatly monitor” the intelligence community’s ability to collect data on suspected criminals which, in turn, requires greater oversight and “controls” of how the technology is deployed. Another member of the new “Super Intelligence Force,” Mr. Michael — who also serves as the Pentagon’s chief technology officer — has said in the past that no real regulation is necessary. “We don’t want government to get in the middle,” Mr. Michael said on CNBC earlier this month. He says the alarms coming out of the industry are part of a “coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”Mr. Trump, too, has raged about the “hoax” of AI risks, arguing that the only thing needed to protect the public is an intelligent president. He says any regulation of the technology should be done via existing systems at the Department of Justice. “I think they’re going to do things for the community that will be really financially beneficial,” Mr. Trump said after his lunch with AI leaders.

Trump Announces ‘Super Intelligence Force’ To Fight Threat He Calls ‘Hoax’

Trump Announces ‘Super Intelligence Force’ To Fight Threat He Calls ‘Hoax’

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