A rename, announced from the podium
President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that the United States will stop calling the technology artificial intelligence. “From this point forward, all of the United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial,” he said. “So it’s super intelligence.”
His stated reason was the adjective. The use of the word artificial, he said, makes the intelligence sound fake, and it is not. “Welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI,” he told the assembly.
The part that is not about vocabulary
The rename arrived attached to a policy position. Trump said the United States rejects any attempt to build a globalist mechanism to control the technology, according to Ynetnews, which reported his remarks from New York. He added that he would not stifle the growth of something he expects to be greater than the Industrial Revolution and the internet itself.
He framed the competition in absolute terms. “Whoever wins super intelligence wins,” he said. “That’s the group that wins. And we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else.”
What a renaming can and cannot do
A president can change the vocabulary of the executive branch. Federal agencies write to style guides, and those guides follow instruction. What the change does not touch is the body of law and regulation already written around the existing term — state statutes, procurement language, the EU AI Act and the standards work that references it, and every international instrument that uses “artificial intelligence” as a defined phrase.
Terminology is also not neutral here. “Superintelligence” has a specific meaning in the technical and safety literature: a system that exceeds human capability across essentially all domains, something no deployed system is. Applying the word to current systems by decree collapses a distinction that safety researchers, and the regulators who read them, rely on.
The week around it
The speech lands in a dense fortnight of US positioning. Trump said on 19 September that he would create an “AI Force” modelled on the Space Force and name an AI czar. Days earlier, the UN’s own independent scientific panel on AI warned that the traditional model of safeguarding is unravelling. Washington has meanwhile proposed an AI incident alert system to Beijing, and the two governments agreed to open a dialogue on the technology.
Rejecting centralised governance from the General Assembly podium while proposing a bilateral incident channel with China is not a contradiction, but it is a choice: cooperation arranged state to state rather than through the institution he was addressing.
What to watch
Whether the change is issued as a written instruction — an executive order or an agency style directive — or remains a declaration from a podium. That is the difference between a rebrand and a rule. Watch also whether federal AI documents, from procurement notices to the standards bodies the US participates in, actually change the words they use.
