At the U.N., Trump Renames Artificial Intelligence as Super Intelligence in All U.S. Documents

At the U.N. General Assembly, Trump said all U.S. government documents will now call artificial intelligence 'Super Intelligence' — a rebrand decided by social-media polls, and one that collides with a word already reserved for machines smarter than us.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that the United States will stop calling artificial intelligence "artificial" and start calling it "super intelligence" — in every official document, and, he hopes, everywhere else. (The Guardian)

"From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world's, will be changed to use the much more accurate term Super as opposed to Artificial," Trump said. "So it's Super Intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of Super Intelligence, dash SI." (Gizmodo)

His complaint was with the word itself. "Many people think that the words 'Artificial Intelligence' are inaccurate," he said, arguing that "artificial" makes the technology sound fake. (Futurism) He was less sure the rest of the world would follow. "Let's see if I have any power," Trump said. "Maybe I do and maybe I don't. We're gonna find out pretty soon." (Gizmodo)

The name was not arrived at scientifically. Over three days, Trump polled his followers on Truth Social and X — first offering Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence or Supreme Intelligence; then narrowing to Superior versus Extreme; and finally, on September 21, putting "Superior" up against "Super." Super won, 65 percent to 35. (Gizmodo)

The rebrand collides with a term that already means something far more serious. "Superintelligence" is what the philosopher Nick Bostrom used in a 2014 book to describe "any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest" — a hypothetical future system, closer to what researchers call artificial general intelligence, and one many experts believe is approaching fast. Today's models, as TechRadar notes, are not that. (Gizmodo) (TechRadar)

What unsettled critics was less the label than the policy wrapped around it. Trump has rejected meaningful regulation of AI, arguing that rules would hand the race to China. "We will only encourage super intelligence," he said. "We're going to encourage it, not rein it in." (TechRadar)

That stance landed days after Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel laureate often called a godfather of AI, told Congress that lawmakers may have "maybe a year, but not much more than a year" to regulate the technology before control slips. "AI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI," Hinton said. "That's called recursive self-improvement." (TechRadar)

Renaming is a familiar instinct. Trump has already turned the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, the Department of Defense into the Department of War and Lake Ontario into Lake America. Whether "super intelligence" sticks is another question. As one far-right commentator, Matt Walsh, wrote on X: "I am already cringing at the thought of conservatives on this site dutifully calling AI 'super intelligence' because Trump just told them to." (Gizmodo)

Sources: Gizmodo | TechRadar | Futurism | The Guardian