Trump Announces an 'AI Force' and AI Czar, but Names Neither

President Donald Trump said Saturday that his administration will form an "AI Force" and name an "AI czar" to run it. The announcement came in a Truth Social post. It named no appointee, no budget, no legal authority, and no start date, according to BBC and CBS News.

What Trump actually said

In the post, Trump wrote that his administration "will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!" He said the government would instead rely on "our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System" to go after bad actors. He called AI "the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet," predicting it could reach "as much as 25% of our Country's GDP," and said the US has to keep beating China on the technology, according to BBC.

Trump compared the AI Force to Space Force, the military branch he created in his first term. The comparison has a gap in it. Space Force exists because Congress wrote it into a defense bill Trump signed in December 2019, per SpaceNews. His Saturday post did not say whether the AI Force needs the same kind of legislation, an executive order, or just a new name for work an agency is already doing.

The czar's chair has been empty since March

The role itself is not new. Trump appointed David Sacks as White House AI and crypto czar in December 2024. Sacks' term as a special government employee expired in March 2026, and he moved into an advisory role, according to CBS News and NBC News. In a CBS News interview last week, Sacks said fears about AI's threat to humanity are "overblown," though he added that some caution is warranted. Trump's post named no successor. "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply," he wrote.

An industry that isn't behind him either

Trump has spent the past two weeks calling AI safety warnings a "hoax." Those warnings are coming from inside the companies building the technology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has urged the industry to slow down, told CBS News' "Sunday Morning" that "there are real dangers" in current AI development.

“the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”

Jack Clark, Anthropic's co-founder, told BBC that a "kill switch" checkable by an outside party may need to be mandatory across the industry. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI both said they agree with Amodei's call to slow down, per BBC, even as Altman told a San Francisco conference that AI companies should be trusted to police themselves: "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." A former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, said on September 8 that Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives" by building self-improving systems, according to CBS News.

Governors aren't waiting on Washington

While Trump framed federal action as unnecessary, three Democratic governors moved on their own the same week. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on September 19 directing a task force to consider requiring an AI "kill switch." Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro called on the federal government to regulate the technology. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger launched her own AI task force and a data center accountability plan, according to NBC News. Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, whose research on neural networks underpins most of today's AI systems, told lawmakers in a closed-door briefing this week that Congress has "maybe a year" to act.

What's confirmed, what isn't

• Confirmed: Trump says he will create an "AI Force" and name a new AI czar (BBC, CBS News, NBC News).
• Confirmed: the prior AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, left that post in March 2026 after his term as a special government employee expired.
• Not confirmed: who Trump will name as czar, what agency or budget the AI Force sits inside, or whether it needs congressional action the way Space Force did in 2019.
• Not confirmed: any timeline. Trump's post did not include one.

Space Force took an act of Congress and roughly a year of legislative drafting before Trump signed it into law. An "AI Force" announced in a weekend social media post, with no appointee and no structure attached, is not that yet. It is a name.