President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the United States is "officially" renaming artificial intelligence to "super intelligence," declaring during his address to the UN General Assembly that the phrase will be adopted in all US government documents as his administration dismisses warnings about AI risks and rules out reining in the industry.
The announcement, made during a wide-ranging speech that also touched on Iran, climate change and Ukraine, was reported live by The Verge and confirmed by Reuters, The Washington Post, the BBC and The Hill. It marks the most visible yet symbolic intervention in AI policy by an administration that has consistently aligned itself with accelerated AI development. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI policy coverage.
What Trump Announced at the UN
"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," Trump told the General Assembly. "So it's super intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI."
The president's stated rationale was that the word "artificial" makes the technology sound fake. "It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It's actually amazing," he said. He appeared to acknowledge the limits of the decree himself: "Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't, we're gonna find out pretty soon."
The Verge noted that Trump has previously ordered renamings including the Gulf of Mexico, Denali and the Kennedy Center, with digital map providers quickly updating labels for US users — but renaming a entire technology category across government documents is a different order of magnitude, and no formal implementation mechanism was described in the speech.
A Rejection of Global AI Governance
The rename came embedded in a broader rejection of international AI oversight. "The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control" AI, Trump said, positioning the US against the kind of cross-border regulatory coordination favored by the EU and debated at the UN.
The president also signaled he has no intention of restraining the domestic industry. "I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution," he said, adding that many people predict the technology will be "bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself."
The Justice Department as Watchdog
Instead of regulatory guardrails, Trump pointed to law enforcement. "We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice," he said, noting that his administration has "already used it having to do with this very subject, and used it very powerfully." Reuters reported that Trump said the Justice Department could rein in AI companies if needed — a statement that will be scrutinized given the administration's simultaneous antitrust entanglements with the same companies, including a lawsuit over an alleged AI slowdown pact filed against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
Dismissing the Doomers
Trump devoted a portion of the speech to ridiculing AI extinction warnings, comparing people who warn about AI risk to those who made climate predictions he dismissed. "These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster," he said. "Same group of people."
He then distilled his position into a competition framing: "Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this. And now I say, whoever wins ... SI. That's the group that wins." The president asserted that the US leads China "by a lot" in the technology and pledged: "We're going to keep it that way."
The speech puts the administration formally at odds with the roughly 73% of Americans who told Reuters/Ipsos this week that AI companies are not doing enough to prevent catastrophic risk — and with safety advocates who argue that dismissing catastrophic risk scenarios as a hoax ignores the evidence-gathering underway inside the labs themselves.
What the Rename Actually Changes
Kritiker wiesen schnell darauf hin, dass „Superintelligenz“ bereits eine etablierte Bedeutung in der KI-Forschung habe – ein System, das die menschlichen Fähigkeiten in praktisch allen Bereichen übersteigt – und dass der von Trump verwendete Begriff eher dem entspricht, was Forscher als ASI bezeichnen, einem hypothetischen zukünftigen Meilenstein, als den heutigen Systemen. Skeptiker argumentieren, die Umbenennung aktueller KI-Produkte und Richtliniendokumente, um übermenschliche Fähigkeiten zu implizieren, könnte die Erwartungen übertreiben und regulatorische Definitionen erschweren, die auf präziser Terminologie beruhen.
Bei Bundesbehörden, Beschaffungsdokumenten, Sicherheitsrahmenwerken und internationalen Vereinbarungen stellt sich in der Praxis die Frage, ob ein Erlass auf Sprachebene in verbindliche Leitlinien umgesetzt werden kann. In seiner ersten und dieser Amtszeit blieben Trumps Umbenennungen in verbraucherorientierten Kontexten oft schneller hängen als in juristischen. Klar ist die Richtung: Die Regierung möchte, dass die Sprache der KI triumphal und nicht künstlich klingt, und sie möchte, dass kein internationales Gremium darüber entscheidet, wie die Technologie geregelt wird.
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