President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like “Little Marco” and “Crooked Hillary”; he changed “fake news” from a phrase describing scammy media outlets to a derogatory term for the press at large. Over the past few weeks, he’s clearly decided he can work the same magic to promote artificial intelligence — branding a technology he wants to accelerate “super”, while turning “artificial” into his latest go-to pejorative and declaring resisters “THE ENEMY.” Some of the biggest names in AI are going along with him. But he’s picked a tough linguistic battle, and it may not pan out the way he hopes.
A longtime AI booster, Trump has gone into pro-robot overdrive since an industry conversation over “pacing” frontier development last month. His current position is that AI safety risks are overblown and US companies need to speed up development, including by building more data centers, which he insists contrary to polling data will be “very popular.” On top of discouraging industry self-regulation, he’s decided AI needs a rebrand by fiat. Trump declared in a rambling United Nations speech last month that “the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake” and promised to rename the technology “super intelligence.” He then followed through with an executive order last week, forbidding the use of “AI” wherever possible.
Changes have been swift. The US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), already a rebrand of the AI Safety Institute, has been renamed the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI). Justice Department press releases have been modified to include the phrase, trumpeting that a man who flooded streaming platforms with AI-generated songs between 2017 and 2024 committed “Super Intelligence-Assisted Music Streaming Fraud.” On Thursday, Trump declared that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”
The same tech company figures who rushed to donate millions to Trump after his election have quickly signed on. Trump’s “First Buddy” Elon Musk has promised to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, while Jeff Bezos declared he likes it because “artificial is not a very flattering thing.” Jensen Huang, whom Trump called live on stage last month to rant that “robots will not be taking over,” has likewise adopted the term. Sam Altman praised it too, though he said OpenAI won’t be changing its name.
As Trump tries to make SI happen, “artificial” is creeping into his vocabulary in the manner of earlier terms like “hoax” and “fake.” He recently announced that his long-favored epithet “fake news media” would be retired in favor of calling the press “artificial media,” and in an October 5th campaign rally (shortly before musing that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego) he declared that concerns about war driving up prices were “just artificial.”
As publicly happy as some AI industry figures have seemed with “SI”, Trump is functionally demanding a major industry rewrite its terminology. “Superintelligence” (one word) long predates Trump’s affection for “super”; it was popularized in an eponymous 2014 book by Nick Bostrom. But the term denotes highly advanced artificial intelligence that could surpass human thought, not the category of AI — an already nebulous term — as a whole. It’s one of several industry buzzwords (alongside artificial general intelligence and “useful general intelligence”) meant to define what comes after the current iteration of the tech.
Trump is functionally demanding a major industry rewrite its terminology
Trump adopting “super intelligence” might seem good for companies that had already hitched their wagon to superintelligence, including Meta and Microsoft. And as public opinion turns against AI, some in the industry may desire a rebrand. But forcing immediate adoption of SI also undercuts companies’ ability to promote big, new, flashy AI products as “superintelligent”, instead applying the term to everything from a future machine god to years-old music-slop generation tools. The field is even taking a downgrade with that additional corny space in the middle, since Trump’s attempts at earnestly good names have never really measured up to his insults.
Meanwhile, Trump will have to convince the other branches of government to get on board with the term. He can’t bar Congress from using “artificial intelligence,” and it appears in existing laws like Trump’s signature Take It Down Act, which administration agencies will need to cite when arguing in court. As appetite for more AI regulation grows, congressional Republicans will have to decide whether to appease Trump by adopting a name many people find unintuitive, freighted with the baggage of Trump’s fairly unpopular pro-industry, anti-regulatory stance.
And to make things even more confusing, pro-regulation figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) were already using the earlier definition of superintelligence in efforts to restrict powerful AI — Sanders cosponsored a bill called the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act in early September.
Trump loves naming things, but his linguistic victories typically work when they’re catchy: either simple nicknames or distinctively funny turns of phrase. (Many people are saying!) “Super intelligence,” by contrast, simply comes off as a euphemism. A lot of Americans have tangible gripes with the industry, particularly around data centers, and insisting the tech is “super” does nothing to assuage these concerns. If anything, Trump’s escalating attempts to strong-arm people into a supposedly nicer term for AI makes him — and the industry itself — look awfully weak.
