Walter Joseph "Jay" Clayton III is an American lawyer and government official who was sworn in as the ninth director of national intelligence on August 3, 2026. A former corporate dealmaker who chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission and later led federal prosecutors in Manhattan, he took charge of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence as it was helping coordinate the administration's interagency work on unidentified anomalous phenomena.

Clayton was born in 1966 at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and grew up in Pennsylvania. He earned an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, studied economics at the University of Cambridge on a Thouron Award, and received his law degree from Penn in 1993. After clerking for a federal district judge in Philadelphia, he joined Sullivan & Cromwell, where he became a partner in 2001, co-headed the firm's corporate practice, founded its cybersecurity practice and worked on major bank deals of the 2008 financial crisis. He has taught as an adjunct professor at Penn's law school since 2009 and at the Wharton School since 2021.

President Donald Trump nominated him to lead the SEC, and he chaired the agency from May 2017 to December 2020. In the four years between government posts he chaired the board of Apollo Global Management, returned to Sullivan & Cromwell as a senior policy adviser and chaired the audit committee of American Express. In April 2025 he became U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where his office handled cases involving terrorism, espionage, money laundering and threats to critical infrastructure.

Trump announced Clayton as his choice for intelligence chief on June 11, 2026, to succeed Tulsi Gabbard. The Senate Intelligence Committee held his confirmation hearing on July 15 and advanced the nomination 9–8 along party lines on July 21, and the full Senate confirmed him 51–47 on July 28. In written follow-up questions, Senator Mike Rounds asked what role the director would play in the administration's "UAP transparency" efforts, including the UAP Governance Board formed by ODNI, the FBI and the Department of War. Clayton answered that because he had not yet been confirmed, he was "not aware of what steps may have been taken to advance UAP transparency efforts." Asked about the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, he described it as a Department of War component charged with addressing UAP "using a scientific framework and a data-driven approach."

In early October 2026, Trump also named Clayton to lead a new White House "Super Intelligence Force," a group of senior officials advising on federal artificial-intelligence strategy, a role widely described as the administration's AI czar. Clayton's place in the UAP record is institutional rather than personal: he took office with no public history on the subject, at the head of one of the three agencies behind the government's first standing interagency board for UAP investigation and declassification.