Trump renames AI "Super Intelligence" — experts say it doesn't add up
At the UN General Assembly on September 22, Donald Trump declared that the United States will officially stop using the term "artificial intelligence" in government documents, replacing it with "Super Intelligence" — or SI. His reasoning: the word "artificial" makes the technology sound fake. He called AI "exciting" and insisted the new label is "a lot more accurate."
> "From this moment on, in all documents of the United States and, hopefully, the entire world, the term 'super' will replace 'artificial.' In other words, welcome to the new world of superintelligence — SI. We'll see if it catches on. It sounds a lot better."
The label, not the law
The rename applies only to federal government documents — per Breaking Defense, there is no White House implementation order published yet and no legal mandate extending to the private sector. No major US tech company — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — has indicated it will adopt the SI label. The industry coined its own terminology decades ago, and it isn't likely to abandon it on the back of a UN speech.
This isn't Trump's first terminology pivot. He previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," and as Google Maps renamed Lake Ontario for US users — here's what everyone else sees for US users in a separate rebrand push, the pattern of top-down label changes is becoming familiar.
A word that already means something else
The problem, as Tom's Guide explains, is that "superintelligence" already has a precise technical definition. Researchers divide the field into three tiers: ANI (artificial narrow intelligence), which covers every AI system available today — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini; AGI (artificial general intelligence), a hypothetical human-level system that does not yet exist; and ASI (artificial superintelligence), a theoretical system that surpasses human intelligence across every domain. Trump's new SI label maps directly onto ASI — a category that exists only in academic papers, not in any shipping product.
Calling today's AI "Super Intelligence" would be like labeling a prototype electric scooter a hypersonic aircraft because "hypersonic sounds a lot better." The underlying technology doesn't change because the label does.
The bigger signal
The terminological shift is less about branding and more about regulatory posture. By collapsing the gap between today's narrow AI tools and a hypothetical all-powerful superintelligence, the framing makes it easier to argue that heavy regulation is either unnecessary or premature. That positions the US against the EU's risk-based AI Act framework — and critics see it as a move to sideline AI safety concerns in the race against China, wrapping a deregulatory agenda in futuristic language.
Whether "SI" outlasts the news cycle is another question. For now, the term is in a handful of federal documents and on a C-SPAN transcript. The rest of the world — and Silicon Valley — is still calling it AI.
