Trump Forms Super Intelligence Force to Coordinate Federal AI Efforts

Trump posted on Truth Social announcing the creation of a "Superintelligence Force," saying the working group will coordinate federal government work to keep the United States leading in the field of superintelligence, and describing superintelligence as potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution and the internet. This is the only first-party action directly issued in the entire story, and it counts as a confirmed fact.

But almost all key details surrounding this action—who actually holds power, how long the deadline is, what the charter constrains—come from The Wall Street Journal's account rather than a White House document. Meanwhile, the other thread about Trump relying on Grok comes from Time magazine and depends on anonymous sources. The two threads do not carry the same credibility, and conflating them would overstate the certainty of the latter.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will chair the working group, effectively becoming the government's AI affairs chief; Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Department of War Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor will serve as vice chairs. These personnel arrangements are currently only source claims.

The same report says the working group has 120 days to submit a report on AI risks and opportunities, and its charter requires developing a plan to address superintelligence threats while avoiding overregulation and regulatory capture. Clayton told The Wall Street Journal that it would be irresponsible for the United States to back away on AI, and that one of the biggest risks is failing to be first.

It should be noted that the source does not provide the working group's formal establishment document, terms of reference, or legal basis. Therefore the judgment that "Clayton becomes the AI affairs chief" is, strictly speaking, still a description at the level of secondhand account, not an institutional arrangement already in effect.

This action came after an executive order requiring U.S. official representatives to call AI "superintelligence." In other words, before the institution landed, unification at the linguistic level had already come first.

The same week, leaders including Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Musk signed the "Frontier Responsibility Joint Pledge" at the White House. The pledge is not legally binding; Trump called it morally binding, and the document misspelled "United States."

On TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec argued that the meeting was largely a rebranding exercise, portraying AI as something terrifying while presenting superintelligence as something else. This assessment is a source viewpoint, but it echoes the sequence of "unifying naming first, then establishing the institution."

Time magazine reported that in December 2025, about a month before U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump held a private meeting with Musk and spent hours using Grok. A source told Time that Trump asked how Venezuelans would react to Maduro being captured, and Grok replied that he was a deeply unpopular dictator and that many people might celebrate his fall.

After celebrations appeared following the January 3 operation, Trump reportedly concluded that Grok was smart. This causal chain—question, answer, action, verification, trust—rests entirely on anonymous sources' accounts, with no independent verification in the source, so it can only be treated as a source claim.

More notably, this kind of narrative uses "the president trusts a chatbot" as an established premise, but the evidence supporting it is far weaker than the fact that "Trump posted."

The Pentagon's AI chief said in June that the military used Grok Gov during the Iran war to deploy and strike targets. This is the most specific claim about Grok's actual use in military scenarios, but it is likewise only an oral statement; the source does not give the scope of use, decision-making authority, or specific combat examples.

This week the Pentagon appointed Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey to co-lead a study on current and future battlefield uses of advanced technology; this appointment is a confirmed fact. The source infers from this that Grok's position within the government may continue to rise—this is the source's inference, not an outcome that has already occurred.

Keeping "the military said it used it" separate from "its position will continue to rise" is the step most easily skipped when assessing this thread.

Sean O'Kane said that despite Amodei having a late-night dinner with Trump, the tension between Anthropic and the Defense Department appears unresolved, and noted that Emil Michael frequently criticizes the company on X.

The significance of this information is that it suggests the relationship between the White House and AI companies is not uniform: on one side are signing pledges and having dinner, on the other are public criticism and unresolved disputes. The source does not say whether the dispute has been resolved, nor what practical impact Michael's criticism has had.