President Donald Trump has created a new Super Intelligence Force to coordinate federal AI efforts, capping a week in which top tech executives signed a White House safety pledge and new reporting described his reliance on Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot.
In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump said the task force will coordinate the government’s work to keep America leading the world in super intelligence, which he described as potentially bigger than the Industrial Revolution and the internet. According to The Wall Street Journal, national intelligence director Jay Clayton will chair the group, effectively becoming the administration’s AI czar. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor will serve as vice chairs.
The task force reportedly has 120 days to produce a report on AI’s risks and opportunities. Its charter calls for plans to respond to SI-enabled threats while avoiding overregulation and regulatory capture. Clayton has said it would be irresponsible for the U.S. to retreat from AI while China advances, telling the WSJ that one of the biggest risks is failing to be first.
The move follows an executive order requiring official U.S. representatives to refer to AI as super intelligence. Earlier in the week, leaders including Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Musk signed a Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities at the White House. The pledge is legally non-binding, though Trump described it as morally binding, and the document misspelled the United States. On TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec suggested the meeting functioned largely as a rebranding exercise, presenting AI as frightening while casting super intelligence as something different. Sean O’Kane said tensions between Anthropic and the Defense Department appear unresolved despite Amodei’s late-night dinner with Trump, noting that Emil Michael frequently criticizes the company on X.
Meanwhile, Time magazine reported that in December 2025, about a month before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump held a private meeting with Musk and spent hours using Grok. A source told Time that Trump asked how Venezuelans would react to Maduro’s capture, and Grok responded that he was a deeply unpopular dictator whose downfall many would likely celebrate. After celebrations followed the January 3 operation, Trump reportedly concluded that Grok was ingenious.
The Pentagon’s head of AI said in June that the military used Grok Gov to deploy and strike targets during the Iran War. OpenAI also has a Defense Department agreement, while Anthropic has been in a dispute over how its models can be used for military purposes. The Pentagon this week tapped Musk and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey to co-lead a study on current and future battlefield uses of advanced technology, suggesting Grok’s standing within the administration may continue to grow.
