White House ‘Super Intelligence’ Task Force to hold its first meeting

Por Sophia Cai and Cheyenne Haslett — POLITICO – TOP Stories

The White House’s Super Intelligence Task Force is set to meet for the first time Thursday as the Trump administration confronts growing fears about AI and its impacts on Americans as well as competitive threats from China.

The meeting is scheduled for 4 p.m. Eastern time and is expected to include more than a dozen Cabinet members and senior officials across the administration, according to an administration official granted anonymity to discuss details, as well as a list of invitees obtained by POLITICO.

Rather than write new regulations, the task force will look at using existing liability laws to hold AI companies accountable for any harm caused when their models go awry. Some agencies are already scrutinizing AI companies — the FTC opened a probe into OpenAI Wednesday over its safety incidents.

Companies have long been held liable for defective products from children’s toys to automobiles under existing consumer protection laws, but the courts have yet to determine if AI labs are legally responsible if their models violate the law while acting autonomously.

The group is chaired by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, with Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management; Emil Michael, undersecretary of Defense for research and engineering; and Andrew Ferguson, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, serving as vice chairs.

Others invited to Thursday’s meeting include Vice President JD Vance, who is in Michigan for a midterm rally Thursday; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; White House chief of staff Susie Wiles; White House Deputy Chief of Staff Richard Walters; Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross.

In addition, the list of attendees includes people whose involvement with the task force has not been previously reported. That list includes: National Security Agency Director and U.S. Cyber Command Commander Gen. Joshua Rudd; Deputy National Security Adviser Mike Needham; Social Security Administration Commissioner Frank Bisignano; and Health and Human Services Department Chief Counselor Chris Klomp.

Kupor told Reuters that the group is expected to release the task force’s goals and responsibilities following its initial meeting.

The task force’s general approach is intended to push forward the doctrine of applying existing legal liability laws to AI companies, as outlined in an executive order Trump signed in June. Among the items in that order is a directive to the Justice Department to “prioritize enforcement” of a set of criminal liability laws against anyone illegally using AI to hack into or otherwise damage systems, a policy response the administration has leaned into more heavily after public calls for regulation of the AI industry grew with revelations of AI agents going rogue and AI researchers publicly resigning over safety concerns.

The task force will work closely with the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies to help ensure AI companies meet safety expectations, Kupor said in an interview with POLITICO.

Its focus will be less on assessing the capabilities of frontier AI models and more on establishing standards for developers based on existing criminal and civil laws, Kupor said.The White House over the summer had drafted an executive order to create a FINRA-like regulator for AI but moved away from it after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg opposed the plan. Zuckerberg helped draft the much more light-touch White House Accord on AI instead, a voluntary agreement that the major AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Nvidia, signed onto.

The document encourages companies to “implement robust internal controls” to monitor the capabilities AI models during training, and empower an internal team to ensure models do not carry out unintended hacks, according to text of the accord shared by the White House.

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories