Trump expected to name Jay Clayton as AI czar, CNN reports
Under the plan described by CBS News, Clayton would keep his post as Director of National Intelligence while also taking on the AI role.
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CNN reports that Trump is expected to pick Jay Clayton as the administration's AI czar. Clayton has served as Director of National Intelligence since August 3, confirmed by the Senate 51-47. He was previously the U.S. attorney in Manhattan and led the Securities and Exchange Commission for most of Trump's first term.
Under the arrangement described by CBS News, Clayton would keep his DNI job while also taking on the AI role, putting one official atop both the 18-agency intelligence community and the administration's AI efforts. Axios reports that the precise duties and authority of the AI czar position, including how it would interact with existing agencies, have not been publicly spelled out.
Trump told Axios at a White House lunch Tuesday with executives from Alphabet, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia that Clayton "would make a good AI czar," saying: "A good man. He's right here. That's a good idea." He pledged to name an AI czar within three or four days of that meeting. A White House official told CBS News that "any personnel announcement will be announced directly by the President" and that reporting before then is "baseless speculation." Trump has separately floated creating a new government agency called the AI Force, Axios reports.
The pick would follow Trump's earlier appointment of venture capitalist David Sacks as crypto and AI czar; Sacks stepped down earlier this year but continues to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Naming a czar would turn the loose self-policing framework in the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, unveiled at Tuesday's lunch, into a personnel decision with a named point of contact for the labs. That accord carries no mandated audits beyond companies' own internal controls, so the appointment matters less for near-term enforcement and more for signaling who in the administration will shape decisions on data center siting, model oversight and the coordination between the FBI, CIA and Justice Department that Trump has described. Clayton's selection would not change the voluntary nature of commitments the labs have already made, but it would give Trump's recent AI commentary a single official channel going forward.