Trump promises an 'AI Force' and an AI czar, with no plan attached

Donald Trump has said he will form an "AI Force" and appoint an artificial intelligence czar, announcing a new arm of government in a social media post that promised to protect the industry from interference while dismissing warnings about the technology as a hoax.

What Trump actually announced

The post went up on Truth Social on Saturday 19 September. "For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my first term," Trump wrote. "To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI 'Czar.'" That is the whole of it. The BBC reports that he offered no details and no timeline, which leaves the size, budget, legal basis and remit of the AI Force undefined. It also leaves open what an AI czar would actually do that the White House's existing technology advisers do not already do.

What he said about the industry

The deregulatory half of the post was more specific. Trump said his administration "will not in any way hinder or stifle the growth of this incredible Industry", adding: "Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!" He called AI "the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country's GDP", and said he intends to keep the United States ahead of China. Enforcement, such as it is, would run through the existing criminal and civil justice system rather than any new AI regulator. Trump also repeated his position that warnings about the dangers of AI are a hoax, grouping them with impeachment efforts, transgender rights and global warming.

Why the warnings were getting louder

The timing is the story. In recent weeks researchers have warned publicly about the pace of development, with one claiming a greater than 10% chance the technology ends up "killing all humans". Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called for a slowdown, proposing industry-wide deceleration, regulation and independent monitoring of model development; Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI have both said they agree with him. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the BBC that a third-party-checkable "kill switch" may have to be mandatory for the industry. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have also each disclosed security breaches or episodes in which their chatbots were used for malicious activity. Altman's answer to all of this has been a request for trust: "The world should trust that we are going to do the right thing because it's the right thing and we feel the magnitude of this," he said at a conference in San Francisco. The three largest labs have separately floated a self-regulatory standards body for the industry - a proposal smaller AI companies have warned would be written in the big labs' favour.

Where the policy actually stands

Nothing about the announcement changes the rules. In the UK, the Joint Committee on Human Rights has published a report calling for a new AI bill, arguing that existing law is ill-equipped for the technology's growth. In the US, lawmakers have proposed legislation, but Altman suggested this week that Washington has struggled to keep pace and said people should have more faith in AI firms to keep their systems safe. AI is expected to come up when Trump meets President Xi Jinping next week, which is likely the nearest thing to a deadline the AI Force has for now.

Our opinion

A force needs a mission, a budget and a chain of command, and this one has a name. Trump has told voters for two years that he would get government out of the AI industry's way, and he spent the weekend saying exactly that again while announcing a federal AI body and a czar to run it. Both halves cannot be policy. The Space Force he keeps invoking as the template was signed into law in December 2019 with a mandate written for it, and it still took years of paperwork to become a working service; "AI Force" has so far produced a paragraph on social media and no counterpart legislation. There is a real vacuum to fill. The labs are publishing safety incidents, their own chief executives are asking to be slowed down, and the standards body they are proposing is exactly the kind of arrangement that the biggest players write to suit themselves - which is why smaller AI firms are objecting to it already. The reasonable reading is that the industry asked for cover, and the President offered branding. If the czar arrives with subpoena power, staff and a published remit, this will look better in hindsight. Until then, an "AI Force" with no defined powers is a press release, and AI policy in Washington remains what it has been all year: whatever the largest labs say it is.