The post
President Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday that the White House considers anyone who uses the term “Artificial Intelligence”, rather than what the post calls “the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence’”, to be “THE ENEMY!” The capitals are his. The post was signed with his name in capitals, HuffPost reported.
He did not say what consequence follows for anyone who ignores it.
Where the term came from
Trump announced the change in late September in his address to the United Nations General Assembly, arguing that “super” was more accurate than “artificial”. He told the assembly that “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”.
The first corporate adopter was Elon Musk, who said on 4 October that SpaceX’s AI unit would be renamed SpaceXSI: “Yes, we will make that change.” He gave no timeline.
What is and is not being claimed
The September change applied to how the US federal government writes. Thursday’s post extends the expectation to everyone, with no mechanism attached to it.
That distinction is the whole story. A government can standardise its own vocabulary — agencies do it constantly, and it is unremarkable. A government cannot make a private company, a researcher or a newspaper adopt a word, and in the United States an attempt to penalise anyone for the words they choose runs into the First Amendment immediately.
The industry has not answered
The Independent reported that none of the AI and technology companies it asked, including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, responded on whether they would adopt the term. The White House has pointed to executives including Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as already using the phrase.
No major laboratory has renamed a product. The term appears in no model card, no pricing page and no technical documentation that matters to anyone building with these systems.
Why a desk covering this has to pick
A publication writing about this field names things, several hundred times a week. “Artificial intelligence” is the term used by the research literature, by the EU’s AI Act, by the standards bodies, and by the companies themselves in their filings. Aivio News will keep using it, and will report the administration’s preference as what it is: the administration’s preference.
What to watch
Whether the preference turns into procurement language. A requirement in a federal contract or grant condition would be the first version of this with an actual mechanism behind it — and the first version a court could be asked to look at.
