Trump creates a 'Superintelligence Force' at the White House and puts his chief of staff in charge of watching it

By T13 (Deutsche Welle) · October 4, 2026.

Donald Trump formalized on Sunday the creation of a coordination committee within the White House to steer the development of artificial intelligence in the United States. It will be led by Jay Clayton, identified in the announcement as director of national intelligence, and the group has been given a name that is itself a statement of intent: the "Superintelligence Task Force." According to Trump, posting on his Truth Social network, its mission is to "coordinate the federal government's effort to ensure the United States continues to lead the world in superintelligence" and to "protect the interests and improve the lives of all Americans."

The committee is not just Clayton. It also includes Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC, the U.S. competition and consumer protection regulator); Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and Chief Technology Officer; and Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM, the agency that administers the federal civil service). All four will report directly to Trump and to his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, according to the information gathered by Deutsche Welle. An official document seen by The Wall Street Journal adds that the group must present proposals "to address the threats AI poses to our society." And the mandate includes, verbatim, carrying out those tasks "while avoiding overregulation" that would penalize innovation and competition.

The appointment comes shortly after Trump decided, in late September, to officially rebrand AI as "superintelligence" through an executive order requiring all federal government agencies to use that term. The move is not trivial: at a moment of growing criticism of the industry — over safety, over jobs, over the concentration of power — changing the official label is also changing the narrative. "Superintelligence" sounds like unstoppable, inevitable progress; "artificial intelligence" sounds, increasingly, like a technology that has to be explained and justified.

The committee's composition is the most revealing part of the story. There is no one on it devoted exclusively to technical safety or model ethics: there is intelligence, competition, defense/technology and the public workforce — the four levers that really drive the machinery of the state in its dealings with industry. It is a design built for the coordination of power — who the government talks to, what data it shares, what contracts it signs — not for oversight of capabilities. And the group's mandate, according to the source, asks for two things that tend to pull in opposite directions: identify real AI threats to society and, at the same time, avoid overregulating. Anyone who has to execute both at once knows that in practice one ends up subordinate to the other, and the "lead the world" logic set out in Trump's own charge leaves little doubt as to which.

This connects to something we have been flagging in our AI governance coverage: the real control point is not always where the model is designed, but in who decides the rules of access to and engagement with it. Here the pattern repeats at the scale of the state: Washington centralizes in a handful of officials — reporting to two people, Trump and Wiles — the government's official relationship with "superintelligence companies," key infrastructure and even religious organizations, according to the committee's own description. This is top-down governance, with little institutional intermediation and a vocabulary — "threats," "lead the world," "superintelligence" — that blends genuine concern with geopolitical competition against China, the other player that really matters in this race.

In the short term, honesty requires saying that this kind of architecture — concentrated power, an ambiguous mandate caught between protecting and not slowing down, accountability limited to the top of the executive branch — is exactly the terrain where AI's risks (disinformation, abuse of critical infrastructure, automated decisions without oversight) have the most room to grow unchecked. The problem is not that the technology is advancing fast; it is who watches whom while it advances. In the long term, if the United States manages to align that coordination with real investment in safety, health and infrastructure — and not just with the race for the "superintelligence" label — the same institutional machinery could accelerate precisely the benefits that underpin our core thesis: an AI that helps cure diseases and distribute abundance rather than merely winning a rhetorical race with Beijing. But that requires the committee to answer to something more than the White House, and for now the announced design does not guarantee it.