Washington Post / CNN / TechCrunch
Major
PolicyTrumpFTCGovernanceTrump names Super Intelligence Force led by DNI Clayton and FTC chair Ferguson
October 4, 20262 min read
President Trump announced a Super Intelligence Force to coordinate federal AI policy, led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton with FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, and OPM Director Scott Kupor as co-leads. The group reports to Trump and chief of staff Susie Wiles and is tasked with coordinating engagement while preventing overregulation.
Why it matters
Ferguson is simultaneously running the FTC probe into OpenAI and Anthropic. Putting the same official on a White House coordination body that is meant to work with those labs creates an unusual dual role: investigator and policy coordinator under a voluntary self-police frame.
President Donald Trump announced on October 4 the formation of a Super Intelligence Force to coordinate the federal government’s AI response, following last week’s White House accord with frontier labs and the executive order rebranding “AI” as “super intelligence.”
Leadership: Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton (chair), FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and OPM Director Scott Kupor. The force reports directly to Trump and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Trump described its mandate as ensuring U.S. leadership in super intelligence and coordinating engagement with consumers, public-interest groups, infrastructure providers, and AI companies.
Reporting indicates the group has roughly 120 days to produce a risk-and-opportunity assessment and is chartered to develop plans for SI-enabled threats while “preventing overregulation and regulatory capture.” Notably, Ferguson’s FTC is already investigating OpenAI, Anthropic, and METR over consumer harms from agentic systems — so one of the force’s leaders is simultaneously an active enforcer against the same companies the body is meant to coordinate with.