Trump named Jay Clayton, the current Director of National Intelligence, as the administration's AI czar. Clayton previously ran the SEC from 2017 to 2020. He spent those years making sure retail traders understood that payment for order flow was perfectly legal and not at all a way for brokerages to sell you out to hedge funds for pennies.
The Director of National Intelligence oversees seventeen intelligence agencies. His job involves classified briefings, threat assessments, and coordinating espionage operations. None of this qualifies him to set policy for artificial intelligence. But why would it need to? AI policy is just deciding which companies get to call their chatbots intelligent and which ones have to admit they built a fancy autocomplete.
Clayton's SEC tenure was defined by his commitment to protecting investors through aggressive non-enforcement. He watched Robinhood gamify options trading for college kids and responded by asking them politely to maybe add a few more disclosure pages. The kids didn't read those either.
Now he'll oversee the government's approach to AI. This means he'll attend meetings where people pretend large language models are three months away from achieving sentience. He'll nod seriously while tech executives explain why their products need less regulation and more subsidies. He'll write a framework that sounds important and changes nothing.
The position doesn't require Senate confirmation. It also doesn't require a background in computer science, machine learning, or any technical field whatsoever. It requires showing up to conferences and saying words like alignment and existential risk without laughing.
Retail traders who spent 2020 trading on insider information they found in Reddit comments will now be trading stocks based on which companies they think benefit from AI policy. They'll buy semiconductor manufacturers at all-time highs and act confused when the stocks go down. Clayton will be too busy updating his LinkedIn to notice.
Photo by History in HD on Unsplash
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