The U.S. government is convening a task force to address AI’s security risks while maintaining American competitiveness in the emerging field, President Donald Trump announced on Sunday.
The “Super Intelligence Force” — which uses the president’s preferred name for artificial intelligence — will “coordinate the federal government’s engagement” with critical infrastructure organizations, AI firms and civil society groups, Trump said in a Truth Social post.
Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, recently named Trump’s “AI czar,” will lead the task force. Other members include FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. The group will have 120 days to prepare a report on the government’s role in addressing AI risks and opportunities.
The creation of the task force comes as the Trump administration seeks ways to head off the many security threats associated with AI — from faster and more sophisticated hacking to custom bioweapons — without regulating the AI industry. During a meeting with executives from major AI companies on Sept. 29, Trump said he would “never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.”
Instead, the White House has taken several steps to prod companies into self-regulation. The executives at the meeting pledged to improve internal testing procedures and submit their models to third-party reviews. In June, Trump signed an executive order creating a pre-release government review process for frontier AI models but made it voluntary for companies.
AI regulation has divided Trump’s senior advisers, with National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly clashing over how aggressively the government should oversee the nascent industry.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the administration had “resisted meaningful safeguards without offering a serious alternative for addressing the national security risks posed by increasingly powerful AI systems.”
Focused on risk, but cyber expertise unclear
Through the new task force, Trump administration officials and AI executives will “develop plans for responding to [AI]-enabled threats to our society,” according to a charter seen by The Wall Street Journal.
Michael, the Pentagon official, will coordinate with AI companies, while Kupor, the government’s personnel chief, will coordinate with critical infrastructure operators and other industry participants. The FTC’s Ferguson will liaise with consumer groups and other advocacy organizations.
It is unclear what role the government’s cybersecurity experts, particularly those at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), will play in the task force’s work. CISA traditionally leads the government’s coordination with infrastructure operators on security and resilience issues, and the agency has incorporated AI into many of its engagements and consultations with the infrastructure community. CISA and other agencies with cybersecurity expertise have published several guidance documents on the secure use of AI, including in infrastructure systems. But CISA has also lost one-third of its personnel since the second Trump administration began, and it is possible that the agency does not have enough experts to contribute to the project.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on CISA’s role in the task force.
Other agencies with cybersecurity expertise also appear to be absent from the task force, including the National Security Agency, which has co-published several AI advisories with CISA, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which runs an AI security research institute.
Uneasy stakeholder relationships
The task force faces significant challenges in trying to knit together a community of industry groups and companies capable of developing AI security recommendations together.
Despite the collegial tone of the Sept. 29 meeting, the Trump administration still has a tense relationship with the AI industry. It blacklisted Anthropic from government contracts by designating it a supply-chain risk, a decision that a federal appeals court recently upheld. And in June, it asked OpenAI to withhold the release of a powerful new model, a request with which the company complied.
Since then, both companies have grown more vocal about the need for government regulation of frontier models, spurred in part by a series of autonomous hacks that exposed failures in the frontier labs’ testing environments.
The government’s relationships with critical infrastructure operators have also deteriorated under the second Trump administration, as the White House has pushed out hundreds of CISA employees and left many utilities feeling abandoned by Washington. The new AI task force appears intent on soliciting infrastructure providers’ feedback on AI security concerns, but the decision to put OPM’s Kupor, and not a senior CISA official, in charge of that work could undermine its effectiveness. It remains to be seen how warmly infrastructure operators will receive the task force.
