WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has formed a new task force to protect taxpayers, critical infrastructure and national security from criminals who use artificial intelligence to commit fraud and carry out hacks, the department announced in a press release on Thursday, November 5.
The Super Intelligence Task Force, known as DOJ-SITF, will combat misuse of the technology by foreign states and state-sponsored groups, transnational criminal organizations, and individual or corporate offenders engaged in fraud or other unlawful conduct, according to the release. “Super Intelligence,” or SI, is the term the executive branch now uses in place of “artificial intelligence,” under a September 29 executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
“SI development will continue to be powered by American innovators,” Attorney General Todd Blanche said in the release. “The SI Task Force at the Department of Justice will facilitate our partnership with Super Intelligence Force Chair Jay Clayton as we ensure critical SI technologies serve the American people and are not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad.”
Who will run it
The task force will be led by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Associate Deputy Attorney General Stephen Weiss. “As technological capabilities evolve, the DOJ-SITF will advance the department’s mission to make America safe,” Woodward said in the release. Weiss said the department must “utilize law enforcement tools at our disposal to deter improper use of SI, harden regular reporting on SI risk and response, and ensure companies exercise vigorous internal controls so that SI technology behaves as intended.”
The new unit connects to a wider White House effort. The Super Intelligence Force, chaired by Jay Clayton, who is also the director of national intelligence, was given 120 days in early October to report on the risks and rewards of the technology. At its first meeting on October 15, it agreed to develop ways for AI companies to give early warnings about breaches, hacks and jailbreaks — attempts to bypass a system’s safeguards — and to set up a law enforcement and consumer protection coordination committee including the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission.
Why it matters
AI has sharply lowered the cost of convincing fraud: cloned voices, fake documents and automated phishing can now be produced at scale, and prosecutors have struggled to match that speed with older fraud statutes and tools. A dedicated task force signals that AI-enabled fraud will be treated as an organized threat rather than a series of one-off cases. What the unit has not yet published is its caseload — no charges were announced with its launch, and its first cases will show how the department intends to use it. The department’s announcements are posted on its official news page.
