President Trump used his United Nations General Assembly address on Tuesday to announce a sweeping semantic shift: the United States will henceforth refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” in all official documents, and he urged the rest of the world to follow suit.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globality scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called super intelligence. Changing the name,” Trump told the assembled delegations.
The president argued that the word “artificial” unfairly diminishes the technology. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he said. “It is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports.”
He continued: “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.”
“In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence – S.I.,” Trump said. “Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate.”
The rebranding push comes as fears about advanced AI are spiking in Washington and beyond. A former researcher at Anthropic recently warned that the technology could soon destroy humanity, intensifying a debate over whether to regulate it. Trump has consistently pushed for lighter regulation, framing the issue as a race against China for technological supremacy.
His remarks at the UN were not the only venue for the AI debate this week. The technology is expected to be a major topic when Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in Washington for a state visit, a summit already shadowed by contentious issues including Taiwan and human rights. Trump’s UN address also touched on Iran, cartels, and Greenland, but the AI name change stood out as a unilateral declaration of linguistic policy.
Super intelligence, as previously defined, refers to a form of AI that surpasses human intelligence. It is both the holy grail for frontier AI firms and the central nightmare for those warning of existential risk. By renaming it, Trump appears to be trying to reframe the narrative—stripping away the “artificial” label that skeptics say implies something less than genuine, and replacing it with a term that sounds both more powerful and more ominous.
Whether other nations will adopt the terminology remains to be seen. But for now, U.S. documents will carry the new designation, a move that could ripple through diplomatic cables, regulatory filings, and international standards bodies. The president’s critics are likely to question whether a name change does anything to address the underlying safety and governance challenges.
As the global community grapples with how to manage the rapid advance of AI, Trump’s UN announcement signals that the United States will continue to chart its own course—both in substance and in style.
