Trump wants to build a military AI Force - and he's already picked a branding fight over what to call artificial intelligence.
In a lengthy Truth Social post Saturday, President Trump said he will create an "AI Force" patterned after the Space Force he launched in his first term, along with a soon-to-be-named AI czar to run it. He waved off AI safety concerns as another manufactured "hoax," promised the administration would go after "BAD" actors in the industry through existing law, and vowed not to "hinder or stifle" the industry's growth. He also floated renaming AI itself, tossing out "supreme," "superior," or "extreme" intelligence as replacements. Only "High I.Q. individuals," he said, should apply for the czar job - a post that has sat vacant since venture capitalist David Sacks stepped down in March.
Space Force is a useful precedent here: it never became an independent fighting force so much as a way to consolidate satellite and missile-warning operations previously scattered across the Air Force, Army, and Navy. An AI Force built the same way would likely be an org-chart change, centralizing the Pentagon's AI programs rather than creating new capabilities. The timing is not flattering. Pentagon investigators are examining whether overreliance on AI contributed to a February strike that killed dozens at a girls' school in Iran, and CNN has reported that an AI-generated intelligence report falsely claimed a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components, prompting armed US troops to prepare to board it before the error was caught. One source told CNN that false China report almost started a war.
A new office meant to police AI's failures, arriving right after two of the Pentagon's worst AI failures, reads less like a fresh strategy than a rebrand of an old one.