Trump sets up a Super Intelligence Force to steer US AI policy

A 120-day task force, a renamed technology and a voluntary CEO pledge critics call toothless now define Washington's approach to AI.

President Donald Trump announced a new federal task force on Sunday, October 4, the Super Intelligence Force, in a post on Truth Social, TechCrunch reported. It anchors a week in which Washington set its AI direction through an executive order, a renamed technology and a voluntary industry pledge, not through binding law.

National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton chairs the task force. The vice chairs are FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael and OPM Director Scott Kupor, according to TechCrunch. The group has 120 days to produce a report on AI's risks and opportunities. That is a short deadline for a technology the administration is now treating as a matter of national security.

The charter hands it two jobs at once. It directs the task force to "develop plans for responding to SI-enabled threats to our society, while preventing overregulation and regulatory capture that would stifle innovation." Those goals pull against each other. One asks for guarding against danger, the other for keeping the rules light. TechCrunch reported that Clayton suggested the biggest risk is not being first, pointing to competitors such as China. Framed that way, the problem the force exists to solve is falling behind rivals, not the technology itself.

The announcement capped an odd week. The White House gathered tech chief executives to sign an AI safety pledge Trump called "morally binding," per TechCrunch's Equity podcast, among them Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Anthropic's Dario Amodei. Days earlier, Trump had signed an executive order rebranding AI as "super intelligence." The new name has not landed cleanly with the public. The same podcast noted that only 2% of consumers are buying it.

TechCrunch described the pledge as non-binding, and noted that the document misspelled "United States." Writing in The Conversation, Jon Whittle of Melbourne Business School said the resulting White House Accord on Super Intelligence lays out a four-point self-regulation plan for frontier AI companies, built on the premise that "We believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely." The accord asks developers to police themselves instead of answering to outside oversight.

Whittle questioned whether such promises hold. He cited a 2025 study finding that only 53% of the voluntary commitments 15 AI companies made to the White House in 2023 were followed. Promises without teeth, he argued, are easy to make and easy to drop. Agreements that work, in his account, need funding, institutions, enforceable consequences and specific commitments. A pledge built on each company policing itself supplies none of that.

For now, the United States' approach to one of the moment's most consequential technologies rests on three things. A task force with a 120-day deadline. A new official name. And a pledge its own signatories are not bound to keep.

Sources

1. Trump unveils his new Super Intelligence Force · TechCrunch, AI
2. Can ‘super intelligence’ and a non-binding safety pact solve AI’s image problem? · TechCrunch, AI
3. Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it · TechCrunch, AI
4. It’s not AI anymore, it’s ‘super intelligence’ (according to the White House) · TechCrunch, AI
5. Why a decade of AI safety promises keep failing to bite · The Conversation, Artificial Intelligence