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The Trump administration’s new AI task force plans to produce a report on the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence within 120 days, according to an interview with the newly announced “AI czar” Jay Clayton on Saturday in the Wall Street Journal. Clayton also serves as the director of national intelligence.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the task force includes three senior officials from the Trump administration as its vice chairs: Emil Michael, undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering; Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management; and Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Other members include the national security advisor in the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice, as well as Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and former AI czar David Sacks, the Journal reported.

The Journal report also said that the task force’s charter states that the body will ensure the U.S. remains at the forefront of “SI” development, referring to super intelligence, which the Trump administration decreed as the new name for AI in an executive order last week. The White House has not released the charter, and a spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump first announced the AI task force in a Truth Social post in September, although at the time he didn’t identify its members. Since then, the White House hosted a number of industry leaders from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta at a lunch, where they agreed to a voluntary joint agreement to enact certain safety measures such as partnering with third-party auditors to evaluate their models. In a Sunday post on Truth Social, Trump confirmed the composition of the task force.

Elon Musk will change the name of SpaceX’s AI unit, SpaceXAI, to SpaceXSI, he said in a post on X on Sunday, adopting President Donald Trump’s preferred name for AI.

Musk had already signaled his agreement with Presidnet Trump that Super Intelligence, or SI, is better than the commonly used AI term, for artificial intelligence. Also on Sunday, Musk posted “No more AI, SI, Its Better”.

President Trump has directed that the U.S. government use the SI term for AI.

Amazon Web Services pledged to spend $1 billion over the next five years upgrading heat and water systems in schools, homes and other municipal buildings, among other projects, as part of an effort to win over local communities who fear data centers.

AWS also promised to stop requiring local governments to sign nondisclosure agreements covering the company’s data center arrangements. Critics, such as Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin have accused Amazon of using NDAs to hide their involvement with data center projects early in their development.

AWS CEO Matt Garman announced the commitments Friday where he defended the company’s data center expansion as part of “a race our nation can’t afford to lose” related to AI. Garman also argued that Amazon data centers use far less water than critics allege, work with utilities to improve the grid and do not uniformly drive up energy rates, and use polluting backup diesel generators infrequently.

Microsoft on Thursday launched speech-generating AI that the company says is both cheaper and more accurate than competing models from the likes of ElevenLabs, SpaceXAI and Google. Microsoft aims to produce voice models to power features such as transcribing conference calls in its Teams app or transcribing patients’ conversations with doctors in its Dragon Copilot AI for healthcare providers.

Microsoft also plans to sell the new voice model to developers of AI apps, including those that feature real-time voice assistants. And the model will power voice mode in its Copilot AI assistant.

The new model, MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, can transcribe and generate speech and at the same time.

“This means we can transcribe and generate in tandem, so you get very high quality and speed,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said. “Over time we expect these new MAI models to replace the speech models currently in production across the company.”

By relying less on external AI providers, Microsoft could use the homegrown models to improve its gross profit margins, as it has aimed to do already with models that automate certain functions in Excel and PowerPoint. Microsoft said its new voice model debuted at the top of Artificial Analysis’ leaderboard in terms of accuracy, ahead of competitors.

AI cloud company Lambda said it has secured its first delayed draw term loan at over $1 billion to purchase more than 30,000 Nvidia graphics processing units. The fixed-rate facility carries an interest rate of 6.78%.

Privately held Lambda said in an announcement late on Thursday the facility received investment-grade credit ratings from Morningstar DBRS and Moody’s. The company said it has three confirmed projects with two unnamed investment-grade clients. Neoclouds including CoreWeave and Crusoe have increasingly turned to DDTLs to finance GPUs, usually backed by contracts with investment-grade customers.

Lambda’s DDTL will finance Nvidia GB300 and VR200 GPUs at data centers in Seattle, Kansas City and Dallas. This deal marks the second time Lambda has raised an institutional credit facility to fund its AI infrastructure buildout, the company said, following the closing of a $926 million senior secured term loan B in late August.

Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered U.S. digital-asset bank, has cut 17% of jobs, CEO Nathan McCauley told employees this week, according to people familiar with the matter.

Anchorage, which provides crypto custody and issues stablecoins, including Tether’s new U.S. stablecoin USAT and Western Union’s USDPT, made the layoffs as the crypto market has been in a year-long slump. It had 400 employees around the globe, according to a congressional testimony by McCauley last February. Anchorage Digital didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In the past month, Bitcoin jumped 9% to trade at above $84,000, but it still hasn’t recovered to its peak level of $126,000 last October. Coinbase announced a job cut of 14% in May, while Robinhood cut 10% of staff in June.

Anchorage was the first crypto firm to gain a national trust charter under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2021, which positioned it to become a major crypto custodian. Under the Trump administration, more crypto firms, such as Circle, Coinbase and BitGo, have obtained the same charters. One of the expected crypto IPO candidates, Anchorage raised a $100 million strategic investment from Tether this year, valuing it at $4.2 billion. It also announced its first-ever employee tender offer concurrently.

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