White House forms AI task force led by Jay Clayton to tackle risks without overregulating

Clayton named 'AI czar' to lead new task force

US President Donald Trump has set up a new White House task force to assess the national security and societal risks of artificial intelligence, appointing his director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, to run it.

The group, which Trump has named the "Super Intelligence Force", has been given exactly 120 days to deliver a report to the president. Its mandate is clear: identify risks from advanced AI models, but do so without introducing heavy-handed rules that could slow down American technology companies or let international rivals, particularly China, take the lead.

Clayton, who is effectively acting as the administration’s new "AI czar", told the Wall Street Journal that Trump wants to ensure America stays "the leaders in superintelligence" and that the public interest comes first. "The risk of not being first is high," Clayton said, arguing that falling behind would only heighten the dangers posed by foreign adversaries. "Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people."

Minimising regulation to protect innovation

This light-touch approach is written directly into the task force’s charter. According to the Wall Street Journal, the document explicitly instructs the group to draw up plans for handling advanced AI-enabled threats while actively preventing "overregulation and regulatory capture" that might stifle competition and domestic innovation.

Clayton’s task force includes some of the administration’s most senior figures, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Clayton is the second person to take on the informal AI czar title under Trump, following venture capitalist David Sacks, who held a similar role earlier in the administration's term before stepping down.

The launch follows a meeting at the White House on September 29, where Trump sat down with the chief executives of the country's top AI firms, including OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, alongside tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. After the meeting, Trump said the executives had signed a "morally binding" agreement to monitor their own systems for safety and submit to voluntary outside audits.

Focus on self-policing

Clayton himself comes from a Wall Street background, having previously served as a corporate lawyer representing financial giants like Goldman Sachs, though he has no direct experience in the technology industry.

Other task force members have already voiced strong opposition to government intervention. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently criticised warnings of existential AI doom as alarmist and unhelpful. In an interview with Axios, Bessent said the responsibility for managing technology risks lies with the developers themselves, calling on the industry to police its own laboratories and produce its own safety solutions.