Clayton to create report outlining AI risks and opportunities
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
Good. We finally have someone treating artificial intelligence like the national security matter it actually is. Jay Clayton is not a Silicon Valley visionary or a think tank futurist.
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Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will serve as the Trump administration’s AI czar and lead a three-month effort to establish the “risks and opportunities” of the technology. Clayton, who was largely expected to lead the White House’s recently formed “Super Intelligence Force,” told the Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview the “risk of not being first is high” as debates about AI policy swirl in Washington.
His appointment comes less than a week after the nation’s leading AI executives convened at the White House and signed a non-binding commitment to self-regulation called the “White House Accord on Super Intelligence.” Google Maps adopts ‘Lake America’ after Trump executive order Trump says the US leads the AI race with China ‘by a lot’ Trump praises DC crowds and downplays heat wave: ‘Isn’t as bad as predicted’ “Not being first increases the identified and unidentified, risks, particularly from our adversaries,” Clayton said. “Being first will better enable us to address these risks on behalf of the American people.” The Trump administration has largely emphasized an anti-regulatory approach to AI policy, often citing a need to ensure American companies outpace their Chinese counterparts. “I feel very comfortable that we’ve gotten a group with a lot of experience, diverse skill sets and a common commitment,” Clayton said in reference to the internal and external participants in the task force, which includes Trump administration officials such as Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent , as well as venture capitalist David Sacks and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “These are all serious people who have addressed opportunities and risks in the past and are committed to doing this so that America wins the SI race and we win it through the benefit of the American people.” Trump also signed an executive order this week changing “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence,” at his own request.
A bipartisan backlash against data center construction gave way to safety and cybersecurity concerns throughout September as lawmakers and the public continued to grapple with AI’s potential impacts on the economy and country writ large.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei became the figurehead of the “pace the frontier” movement in the wake of supposed hacking incidents, which, combined with the public’s negative perception of AI, have created calls for regulation throughout the summer.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Grok CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined Amodei, Trump, and House Speaker Mike Johnson at the signing ceremony on Tuesday.
Johnson described the commitment as “robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review.” Clayton also noted in the interview the task force would discuss potential legislative options that could be part of an AI framework moving forward.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Good. We finally have someone treating artificial intelligence like the national security matter it actually is. Jay Clayton is not a Silicon Valley visionary or a think tank futurist. He is the Director of National Intelligence, and he is spending the next three months doing something straightforward: listing the risks and the opportunities. That is the right job description for the most consequential technology of our lifetime.
The left spent four years treating AI as a regulation problem. The Biden administration’s answer was an executive order that read like a law review article, full of redress mechanisms and equity audits. Meanwhile Beijing was building out state-backed AI infrastructure and the rest of the world was waiting for us to trip over our own rules. Clayton's approach is a course correction. He understands that the first question about AI is not what it might do to some graduate student's dissertation. The first question is what it means for American security, our economy, and our ability to stay ahead of adversaries.
A three-month review is refreshingly unmacho. It is also smart. The "Super Intelligence Force" sounds like a comic book, but the underlying instinct is correct: this should be coordinated, deliberate, and fast. Clayton’s background at the SEC gives him experience with markets and rules. His current job gives him clear eyes on what foreign actors can do with this technology. That combination matters more than another panel of tech CEOs congratulating themselves.
There is always a risk that bureaucracy swallows the urgency. That is the real thing to watch. If this becomes a three-month exercise in writing a memo that gets filed under "future threats," then we have wasted one of the best chances to actually lead. But if Clayton uses this to set clear priorities, cut through the nonsense, and put American interests first, it will be the most serious AI policy work this town has seen in years. Give the effort a chance to produce a real result. Let's see what the report says.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.