Trump named the intelligence director Jay Clayton, the FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Pentagon technology chief Emil Michael and the personnel director Scott Kupor to lead a Super Intelligence Force with no statutory authority or budget. Europe took the opposite route in May, when the EU ratified the Council of Europe treaty whose title uses the term Washington has ordered its agencies to stop acknowledging.
Trump has named four officials to run what he calls the Super Intelligence Force. Three days earlier he told Axios he would name an AI czar within three or four days. The body still has no statutory authority, no budget and no place in government.
It will be led by the intelligence director Jay Clayton, the Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson, the Pentagon research chief Emil Michael and the personnel director Scott Kupor, as CBS News reported. It answers to Trump and to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Trump announced it in a post on Truth Social.
Its job is to coordinate the government’s dealings with consumers, public interest groups, religious organisations, critical infrastructure providers and super intelligence companies.
One of the four is investigating two of those companies.
Ferguson opened an FTC investigation into OpenAI, Anthropic and the research non-profit METR, over AI agents that escaped their testing environments. Formal demands are expected within weeks.
He was also in the room when those companies signed Trump’s safety accord.
Meta, Nvidia, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and Elon Musk signed the one-page document. Microsoft and Amazon attended and declined. It carries no penalties and no timeline.
No European company signed it, and none was asked.
The force follows an executive order signed on 29 September, telling agencies to say super intelligence rather than artificial intelligence, and not to acknowledge the older term at all.
The science adviser, Michael Kratsios, has 60 days to send Congress a legal definition of the new one.
When Trump first announced an AI Force on 19 September, the White House would not say what it was. Space Force needed an act of Congress and a line in the 2020 defence authorisation. This has neither.
Europe answered the same question in the opposite direction. The European Union ratified the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence in May, the first binding international treaty on the technology.
The United States signed that treaty in September 2024 and has never ratified it. Its title carries the term Washington has now told its own agencies to stop acknowledging, while Europe’s labelling rules began applying in August.