Donald Trump used part of his United Nations General Assembly speech to announce he wants to rename artificial intelligence to “super intelligence.”
During his address to the UN General Assembly, Trump rejected any international effort to regulate artificial intelligence. He also revealed he wants the term “AI” replaced with “super intelligence,” or “SI,” across all US government documents.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called super intelligence,” he told the assembly.
He explained his reasoning bluntly.
“Changing the name in that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake,” he said.
“It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. 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.’ So it’s super intelligence.”
Trump is dismissing concerns about AI risk
Trump acknowledged that new technology tends to bring challenges, but compared people warning about AI’s dangers to those who previously predicted catastrophic outcomes from climate change.
“Every major new technology brings challenges,” he said, likening people who once warned “we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming” to those “now saying that AI is going to kill us all.”
He said the US would take a hands-off approach going forward.
“We will only encourage super intelligence. We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in super intelligence, and we’ll continue to do so safely and responsibly. Americans have never been a nation that retreats from a frontier or shrinks from a challenge, no matter how great or how daunting that challenge may be.”
The idea is mocked even by his own supporters
Despite the announcement, there’s currently no confirmed formal directive putting the name change into effect. People have still voiced their opinions about it.
Far-right commentator Matt Walsh mocked the idea on X, calling it “bizarrely dystopian” and questioning why this was the focus “right before an election with gas prices through the roof.”
“Superintelligence” is also already an established term in AI research. It refers to a hypothetical future system that surpasses human intelligence and was first used by philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2014 book of the same name.
Should a formal rename happen, it likely wouldn’t come cheap. Updating official documents, government websites, legal and regulatory language, procurement contracts, and internal software across every federal agency referencing AI would take time and resources, which would typically be funded through taxpayer dollars, the same way past federal renaming efforts, like changing signage and maps for the Gulf of Mexico, have been.
Not the first rebranding during Trump’s second term
Trump has taken a liking to rebranding things during his second term.
Because of the ongoing trade dispute with Canada, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to refer to Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
He also renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” and Palm Beach International Airport was formally renamed the President Donald J. Trump International Airport.
The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts also had Trump’s name added to it, with its annual honors briefly rebranded the “Trump Kennedy Center Honors.” A federal judge ruled the renaming illegal, however.
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