Trump's new AI czar is his spy chief — and he owes a report in 120 days

Trump has made his Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, the new AI czar. Clayton will lead the Super Intelligence Force, a new task force meant to "ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence." He told the WSJ that a report on the technology's risks and opportunities is due within 120 days.

The group is packed with senior officials. FTC chair Andrew Ferguson, OPM director Scott Kupor and Pentagon CTO Emil Michael are the vice chairs, and JD Vance, Pete Hegseth and Scott Bessent are members. Condoleezza Rice and David Sacks, who was AI czar until March, will advise from outside government. The name isn't just branding: Trump has already ordered federal agencies to write "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence" in official correspondence.

The same weekend, OpenAI safety lead David Robinson resigned after about 3.5 years. In an essay in The Atlantic he called the company's culture "broken." Robinson oversaw safety reporting for 12 frontier-model launches and helped draft OpenAI's Preparedness Framework. He argues that iterative deployment, meaning ship first and fix safeguards after things fail, "guarantees periodic failures" that get more dangerous as models improve. He is the fourth safety staffer to leave OpenAI in about a week.

Why it matters: Washington is now running AI policy through its intelligence chief, while the people writing frontier-lab safety reports are leaving and saying publicly that it isn't careful enough.