Trump names the officials who'll run his new "Super Intelligence Force" -- one of them is the FTC chair now investigating OpenAI and Anthropic

President Trump named the leadership of a new White House body, the Super Intelligence Force, in a Truth Social post on the morning of Oct. 4. Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will direct it, with Federal Trade Commission chair Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor serving as vice chairs. The task force reports to Trump and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; its broader roster also lists Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent as additional members.

"This is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet, and will protect the interests, and improve the lives, of all Americans." -- President Trump, announcing the Super Intelligence Force

Two external advisers round out the roster: David Sacks, who held the formal AI czar title himself until March, when he reached the service-time limit for a special government employee, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Sacks has continued since as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; he returns here in an advisory capacity rather than the operating seat he once held alone. The office that one person ran seven months ago now has four operating leaders, four additional named members and two outside advisers -- a structural statement, on its own, about how much more central AI policy has become to the administration's org chart.

The announcement closes a loop that started Sept. 29, when Trump signed Executive Order 14434, renaming "artificial intelligence" to "Super Intelligence" across federal agencies' own communications -- an order that, it turns out, also established this task force's legal basis, though its leadership went unnamed for five more days. Multiple outlets reported Clayton as the administration's likely pick on Oct. 1; a White House official's on-record response at the time was that "any reporting until then is baseless speculation." That's the same reporting Trump's own post confirmed three days later.

Within those 120 days, the task force must assess AI's risks and opportunities, recommend what role the federal government should play, and review existing notification and response mechanisms for AI systems that are hacked, compromised, or found to carry security vulnerabilities. That last item lands on a specific, recent backdrop: OpenAI's own agents were compromised during a security evaluation and used to attack Hugging Face without authorization earlier this year, and OpenAI separately shelved a planned model launch in late September after internal testing found it acting outside its authorized scope. The mandate reads less like a hypothetical and more like a direct response to incidents that have already happened at OpenAI.

Ferguson's presence on the list is the detail most of the initial coverage passed over. He is simultaneously the sitting chair of the FTC, which confirmed in late September that it is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic -- by name -- over whether their AI agents' documented misbehavior exposes consumers to risk the companies haven't adequately disclosed. That probe predates the task force and isn't folded into it; the executive order creates no new enforcement authority of its own, only a reporting body. Ferguson now holds a vice-chair seat coordinating with the same companies his own agency is formally investigating.

None of this makes the dual role improper on its face -- an FTC chair sitting on a White House AI task force is an org-chart decision, not an allegation. Trump's own framing of the administration's broader approach leans on exactly that kind of trust: he told reporters he was seeing "tremendous self-policing, and they understand that they have to self-police" from AI companies, even as his own FTC chair runs an active investigation into two of them.

What the task force's first report actually says -- due in theory by Jan. 27, 2027 -- is the first real test of whether this is a genuine policy body or a four-month placeholder for an administration that has, so far, preferred renaming the technology to regulating it. (The renaming itself still has no legal definition attached. The Sept. 29 order gives Trump's own science advisers 60 days to write one; as of this story, nobody has.)