Super Intelligence Force: who leads Trump's new AI body

President Donald Trump has set up a Super Intelligence Force to coordinate the federal government’s work on artificial intelligence. He announced it on Sunday in a post on Truth Social. Four officials will lead it: Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence; Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; Emil Michael, the under secretary of war for research and engineering and the department’s chief technology officer; and Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management. The new body reports to the president and to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

The name is not a slip. Since 29 September the executive branch has been told to stop saying “artificial intelligence”.

What the Super Intelligence Force will do

The post gives the Super Intelligence Force, or SIF, a broad task: “coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence”. It will run the government’s dealings with consumers, public-interest groups, religious organisations, critical infrastructure providers and the companies that build the technology.

The post gave no budget, no staff numbers and no legal basis. It did not say whether an executive order will follow.

The choice of leaders says something about the job. Each of the four holds a different lever. The intelligence director sees what foreign rivals are building. The FTC polices consumer protection and competition. Mr Michael runs the War Department’s research. The personnel office sets the rules for the federal workforce that is meant to use the technology. Missing from the list are the Commerce Department, which runs export controls on chips, and the president’s science adviser.

Why AI is now Super Intelligence

The renaming came first. On 29 September Mr Trump signed an executive order that makes it policy for the executive branch to “use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’”. As far as the law allows, agencies must apply it in letters, websites, reports and policy documents, and the government “will not acknowledge” the old terms.

The order changes the words, not the law. For now Super Intelligence means exactly what “artificial intelligence” means in the existing federal statute. Older regulations, contracts and grants stay as they are. Within 60 days, which is by 28 November, the president’s science and technology adviser must send him draft legislation for a new federal definition. That would need Congress.

The order says the old term undersells what today’s systems can do. They “do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence”, it says.

The accord behind the Super Intelligence Force

Mr Trump’s post presents the new body as a follow-up to “the Historic White House Accord on Super Intelligence”. He signed that accord at the White House on 29 September with six technology leaders, Defense One reported: Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman of OpenAI, Elon Musk of xAI and Jensen Huang of Nvidia.

The companies pledged four layers of checks on their most advanced models. These are internal controls on what the models can do, including cybersecurity; internal teams to run those controls; independent outside auditors; and independent committees to oversee the auditors’ reports. Mr Musk summed it up as “just generally grading each other’s homework”.

The accord is voluntary, and the administration wants it to stay that way. Vice President JD Vance told the executives that the answer to AI risks “is for you guys to take the risk seriously, not to come to the government for a regulatory regime”, according to Defense One.

What it means for the industry

For the companies, the message is that Washington wants to coordinate, not regulate. The White House fact sheet on the order lists the administration’s earlier steps. They include more than $5bn for the Genesis Mission, a federal programme to use AI in science; an action plan from July 2025 with more than 90 federal actions; and a policy framework from March 2026 with proposals for legislation.

That leaves the hard questions open. A voluntary accord has no penalties. A coordinating body with no stated budget has to work through agencies that have their own agendas. And the companies that signed compete with each other on the very models the accord is meant to check.

What to watch

• The first moves: who staffs the Super Intelligence Force, and whether a formal order sets out its powers.
• 28 November: the deadline for the draft federal definition of Super Intelligence.
• The auditors: which outside firms the six companies hire to check their models, and whether they publish what they find.
• Congress: whether lawmakers take up the definition, or the accord’s checks, in law.