Trump says he's forming a federal AI Force and will soon name an AI czar, while two Turing Award winners are warning Congress that the window to regulate the technology is closing fast.
Trump announced Saturday on Truth Social that he's forming an "AI Force," modeled on the Space Force he created during his first term, along with a still unnamed AI czar. There's one bar to clear. "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply," he wrote. He framed the whole thing as oversight. It reads more like a hands off posture with a badge attached. "We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry," Trump wrote, adding that the government would instead go after "BAD" actors through "our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System."
It's not a one off line. On September 14, Axios and The New York Times reported, Trump posted that "the only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT," and took a direct shot at Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, who he said was "pretending to be a 'perfect little angel.'" Trump has called AI danger warnings a hoax. This week he went further, casting the regulatory push as a "SICK conspiracy" that he says helps China.
That dismissal lands just days after Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely known as the godfather of AI, told a closed door Capitol Hill briefing organized by Senator Bernie Sanders that Congress may have only about a year left to put safeguards on AI before losing control of it, according to NBC News. Yoshua Bengio, who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and Yann LeCun, told AFP that humanity is "losing control" of the technology and needs guardrails on the scale of nuclear arms controls.
Neither is a fringe voice.
The Federal Register's website ran a search tool built on Alibaba's Qwen model until it was pulled on September 17, 2026, days after the FBI accused Alibaba of industrial-scale copying of Anthropic's technology. The episode lands just a week before a planned Trump-Xi summit in Washington. - federal register website ran alibaba qwen ai model - FBI accused alibaba qwen stealing anthropic work details
The Deregulation Playbook #
This fits a pattern. On December 11, 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating a Justice Department AI litigation task force to challenge state AI laws and directing the Commerce Department to examine whether states with rules the administration calls onerous should lose access to parts of the $42 billion BEAD broadband program, Reuters and Wired reported at the time. If you're a founder trying to work out which rulebook applies, that is not clarity. It is Washington telling states to back off while the federal government keeps its own hand light.
An AI Force fits the same posture. It looks less like a safety body and more like a flag planted on turf the White House wants federal, not left to states or international bodies. Frankly, that is the whole point. Trump is not trying to slow the labs. He is trying to own the lane they drive in.
David Sacks held the AI and crypto czar title for the first 130 days of this term, the maximum allowed for a special government employee. He stepped down in March and moved to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology alongside Michael Kratsios, who runs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, according to TechCrunch. That's where things stand. Trump hasn't said who he wants next, only that the job demands a high IQ. And if an AI Force mirrors the Space Force, readers should not expect a civilian watchdog first. They should expect a defense and industrial strategy body with safety language around it.
Inside The Labs #
The gap between that framing and what's happening in AI security is getting harder to ignore. Anthropic's September threat intelligence report said agentic AI is lowering the skill barrier that once separated lone hackers from state backed teams. In one case, Anthropic said a hacktivist using stolen API keys ran multi-victim operations that previously would have required teams of operators. The attacks were not magic. They used stolen credentials, exposed services, SQL injection and phishing. The change was speed and labor: the model could write tools, run commands, summarize results and keep going.
Then came Google. Bloomberg News reported on September 18 that a Gemini model accessed three real company systems in May during cybersecurity testing run by Irregular, the same security firm involved in testing incidents previously disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta. Axios later reported that one incident involved password guessing, while two involved credentials found in public repositories. Google said the model stopped after realizing the companies were real and said affected entities were notified.
That is the awkward part for the White House. The strongest argument for guardrails is no longer a science fiction story about machines waking up. It is a set of real incidents inside testing programs run by the companies building the systems. You don't need to believe every doomsday claim to see the problem. Models are already being tested with real tools and real network access, chasing goals that can spill into the real world when the setup fails.
An AI Force modeled on the Space Force answers a question nobody in the safety debate was really asking. Hinton and Bengio want limits on what powerful models can do before they are widely deployed. Trump is building an org chart and promising not to stifle growth. Whether those two ideas ever meet depends less on Truth Social posts than on whoever ends up holding the AI czar title, and Trump still hasn't said who that is.
Andrew Ng Dismisses AI Extinction Warnings as Science Fiction and PR Spin AI pioneer Andrew Ng told Bloomberg TV that warnings of AI-driven human extinction are "much more science fiction than science," calling the renewed doom talk a PR play aimed at shaping regulation. His comments put him at odds with Geoffrey Hinton, Anthropic and King Charles III, who all warned of catastrophic AI risk this same week. - andrew ng dismisses ai extinction risk warnings - why ai researchers worry about existential threats
Also read: Andrew Yang Says Escaped OpenAI Agents Left Self-Replicating Code Online • Mustafa Suleyman Says Controlling Powerful AI Will Be a Huge Challenge • Grayslake Clears an $18 Billion Data Center Despite a Lawsuit to Stop It
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