Trump's Super Intelligence Force is sellable but not shippable

By Nikhil Raghavan · Reporting from San Francisco · October 5, 2026

Trump named Jay Clayton to lead a Super Intelligence Force, but substituting executive rebranding for mandatory safety testing creates an apparatus that cannot catch failures before they happen.

Rebranding the future while ignoring the code

President Trump has decided that the word "artificial" makes the technology sound "fake." As reported by the BBC and NPR, he signed an executive order renaming artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence" or "SI" in all official correspondence, websites, and reports. To oversee this linguistic pivot, the administration unveiled a task force called the "Super Intelligence Force." As detailed by CNN and the Egypt Independent, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton leads the team. It includes Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon research chief Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. The group reports directly to the President and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

The mechanism here is familiar to anyone who watched Executive Order 14110. That order attempted to govern algorithms through presidential fiat without statutory backing from Congress. Like its predecessor, this executive task force tries to substitute a centralized policy framework for actual legislation. It operates in a space where no federal law broadly regulates the development or use of AI. But paperwork does not alter weights and biases. A name change does not fix a broken inference pipeline. OpenAI pulled the release of its latest model last month due to safety concerns. OpenAI technology was also involved in an unauthorized breach of Australian government systems, as noted by the BBC. In both cases, no amount of executive vocabulary changes prevented the underlying system from failing at scale.

The administration’s answer to these engineering failures is not statutory oversight or mandatory testing. Instead, it relies on a voluntary regulation pact signed on September 29 by executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, and Google. Trump told reporters that he is "seeing tremendous self-policing." The BBC reported that tech bosses signed this arrangement, which the President described as "morally binding." Meanwhile, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told Politico's Decoded newsletter that "the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency." Commercial actors invite the state to trust their internal audits while treating safety incidents as acceptable collateral damage. Asking them to self-police is like asking a driver to grade their own speeding ticket.

Building a task force out of enforcement anomalies

The strongest opposing case for the Super Intelligence Force cites experienced administrators like Jay Clayton. Clayton previously served as SEC chairman and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Supporters argue this group creates an agile response team that moves faster than traditional congressional rulemaking. In this view, cutting regulatory red tape allows the United States to secure technological dominance without choking innovation. Pentagon tech chief Emil Michael echoed this sentiment on social media. He wrote that the Department of Defense "has seen what is possible when red tape is removed and America's best technology is rapidly put into action."

This argument mistakes task force credentials for an implementation strategy. Clayton noted during his confirmation hearing that when something is "both an opportunity and a threat, you better get your arms around it." Yet the administration's framework explicitly rejects federal slowdowns or mandatory pauses. Furthermore, Michael's inclusion brings a history of aggressive procurement engineering. As Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Michael played a central role in blacklisting AI firm Anthropic from military contracts. That happened after the company resisted mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use. Putting the official who blacklisted uncooperative labs in charge of a civilian AI task force does not streamline governance. It militarizes it.

To compound this, OPM Director Scott Kupor brings a venture capital pedigree straight from Andreessen Horowitz into federal personnel policy. He engineered a massive civil service contraction while standing up the United States Tech Force to hire AI workers. The administration has fused military rapid-acquisition pipelines, venture-backed hiring initiatives, and voluntary industry pacts under White House oversight. It constructed a governance apparatus designed entirely to accelerate deployment. In doing so, it hollows out the career civil servants who would otherwise audit the code.

Waiting for the pager to go off at three in the morning

We saw this exact pattern during the tenure of SEC Chairman Jay Clayton (2017-2020). Back then, regulatory bodies relied on industry self-certification for complex, fast-moving markets. It failed because commercial incentives to ship high-margin products overwhelm the analytical headcount of reviewing agencies. The historical record predicts that voluntary self-policing pacts will quietly collapse. That collapse will happen the moment a major lab deploys a model that compromises critical infrastructure or leaks classified data. An interagency committee will scramble to draft press releases while the servers keep running.

Renaming a sector and relying on tech executives to be morally bound is sellable to investors. But it is not shippable in reality. The proposal provides zero statutory teeth and zero mandatory pre-deployment audit requirements. It offers zero technical capacity to inspect model weights before production. An unvetted model deployed by a self-policing lab will inevitably cause a catastrophic failure in critical infrastructure. When that happens, no one from the Super Intelligence Force will answer the pager at three in the morning. There is no mechanism in this framework to catch the failure before it occurs.

Trump's Super Intelligence Force is sellable but not shippable

Rebranding the future while ignoring the code

Building a task force out of enforcement anomalies

Waiting for the pager to go off at three in the morning

Sources