This Sunday, the U.S. President Donald Trump officially named Jay Clayton, head of American intelligence, to lead a working group on artificial intelligence (AI), with priority on coordination but not on regulation.
The “Super Intelligence Force,” led by Mr. Clayton, is “charged with coordinating the federal government’s efforts to ensure that the United States continues to be at the global forefront in Super Intelligence,” the president wrote on his Truth Social network.
The American leader decided, at the end of September, to rename AI as “super intelligence” and issued a decree so that the term is now used across all government services.
Trump noted that the unit led by Jay Clayton, “will coordinate the government’s relations with consumers, large corporations, religious organizations, operators of key infrastructure and super intelligence companies.”
Clayton had revealed on Saturday, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the creation of this group and his designation as its lead. This assignment adds to the duties he currently holds.
The Wall Street Journal revealed that the group will have the mission of making proposals “to address the threats related to (AI) to our society.”
This objective must be pursued “while preventing over-regulation and regulatory capture that would penalize innovation and competition,” the document adds.
Regulatory capture consists of letting some market actors define the regulatory mechanisms themselves and agree to preserve their competitive advantage.
The unit will leave to the industry itself the bulk of AI risk management, officials told the Wall Street Journal, while working with sector companies.
For reminder, following a meeting held Tuesday at the White House, the leading AI executives made a series of commitments in this area, notably the integration of independent evaluators and the establishment of additional internal controls.
All of this is to face China!
All of this comes in response to measures taken by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, following incidents in which AI models in testing phases spontaneously connected to the Internet and intruded on dozens of sites and platforms.
A hundred former employees or staff of these companies have warned about the dangers of AI becoming increasingly difficult to control as its capabilities improve.
In this context, Trump criticized these warnings, deemed too alarmist, and warned against a slowdown in the pace of AI development, suggested by Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Demis Hassabis (Google).
In case of model misbehavior escaping the control of their creators, the American president said that he preferred civil liability for companies over regulation, so that they could be held liable in court for a failing AI as consumer product manufacturers can be.
The appointment of Jay Clayton marks “the White House’s acceptance that AI has become increasingly central to the footprint this government will leave,” commented Aalok Mehta of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
For him, the former business lawyer will have to navigate “in a very narrow corridor” to avoid hindering AI companies while giving assurances to the American public who are predominantly worried about the consequences of this technology.
Moreover, the fact that Donald Trump chose the head of intelligence for this mission “shows (that he) sees AI through the lens of national security and particularly as a tool in the competition with China,” analyzes Connor Martin of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a think tank.
In this sense, he adds, “it is clear that, for now, the government does not wish for laws or decrees that establish significant regulation.”
