Justice Department launches a Super Intelligence Task Force
A memo dated 13 October merges the department's January AI task force into the new body; the bank regulator OCC and the SEC have also adopted the term in recent documents.
- Government & policy
- Security & misuse
- Notable
The US Department of Justice announced the formation of a Super Intelligence (SI) Task Force, abbreviated DOJ-SITF, on Thursday 5 November. It is led by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Associate Deputy Attorney General Stephen Weiss. The release said its job is to stop foreign state and state-sponsored actors, transnational criminal organisations, and individual or corporate actors engaged in fraud from misusing SI. Attorney General Todd Blanche said it would “facilitate our partnership with SI Force Chair Jay Clayton”, the head of the White House body named in October.
The founding document is a memorandum dated 13 October, linked from the release. It cites Executive Order 14434, the 29 September order that told agencies to say “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence”, and says the department’s AI Task Force, announced on 9 January 2026, “shall cease to operate as a separate body” and is merged into the new one. The task force is to organise criminal and civil enforcement involving SI, deconflict investigations across components, recommend enforcement priorities, and advise on “legislative or regulatory proposals that promote SI innovation without burdensome regulation”. Components and US Attorneys’ Offices may be asked to notify it when opening investigations and before seeking charges, though a footnote exempts urgent cases. Members include representatives of the Antitrust, Civil, Criminal and National Security Divisions and the FBI. The memo states that it creates no enforceable rights.
The release gave no caseload, budget or staffing figures. It follows the October arrest of a former OpenAI engineer, which FBI Director Kash Patel described in terms of protecting American SI innovation.
Other agencies have adopted the terminology. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s Bulletin 2026-54, issued on 4 November, is titled “Super Intelligence: Supervisory Framework” and defines the term in a footnote as the technologies “previously encompassed by the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’”. The bulletin is a resource for examiners, not new expectations: it says control intensity could rise with the consequences of an agent’s failure or misuse and that banks need not define a separate SI risk appetite. On 9 November the SEC held a roundtable on machine-understandable data, announced on 19 October, which its chief economist said would inform how the Commission “can better facilitate SI”.