New AI Czar Jay Clayton Gets 120 Days to Report on Tech’s Risks

The White House has reportedly given its artificial intelligence task force 120 days to report on the risks and potential rewards of the technology.

That’s according to a report Saturday (Oct. 3) from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), citing comments by Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence and now AI czar.

“The president asked that a group be put together that was going to ensure exactly what he said,” Clayton said, that “we stay the leaders in super intelligence, and that the interests of the American people are put first.”

President Donald Trump announced last month he was going to name a new AI czar after the resignation of the previous person to hold the role, David Sacks.

Clayton will oversee the “Super Intelligence Force” which uses Trump’s new name for AI: super intelligence or SI.

“The risk of not being first is high,” Clayton said. “Not being first increases the identified, and unidentified, risks, particularly from our adversaries. Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people.”

WSJ noted that the group’s formation follows a meeting last week between Trump and executives from several leading AI companies in which they agreed to a set of principles governing the technology.

Among them are internal controls to track model development, third-party model reviews and notifications to the board of directors about those safety efforts. Trump called these voluntary moves the right approach, the report added.

“I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution,” said Trump, who called the agreement “morally binding.”

“The accord sets no penalties for companies that fall short, and it doesn’t require them to publish audit findings,” PYMNTS wrote in a report on the agreement last week.

Its text describes the controls as steps each company “should implement,” and that these steps could eventually become law or regulation. Even some industry figures described the deal as a first step, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei telling reporters the pact was just “a start.”

The task force will still defer to the industry as the main vehicle for handling risks, officials told WSJ. But it will work in tandem with the AI sector to determine risks and opportunities.

“I expect there will be mechanisms developed in dialogue, just like there are in other industries,” Clayton said, per the WSJ report.

He pointed to risk models for the financial industry that have been established with the help of the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission. Clayton said the task force would study current law and explore possible measures that Congress could take.

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