The United States is lobbying international partners to stop using the term "artificial intelligence" and adopt "super intelligence" instead, Treasury Undersecretary Erin Browne told Reuters in an interview on Thursday. The push, confirmed in Bangkok, forms part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to rewrite the vocabulary of technology policy well beyond US borders.
According to Reuters, the Treasury is actively negotiating with International Monetary Fund shareholders to replace "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" in official international communications. The immediate vehicle is the statement of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC), the IMF's principal advisory body, which sets the tone for how member governments describe economic and technological priorities. Because the United States currently holds the rotating G20 presidency, Washington wants the new terminology to take hold internationally through the IMFC statement, giving the rename a multilingual, multilateral stamp of approval. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI trends.
How the Negotiations Stand
Browne declined to say whether Washington would refuse to sign off on the IMFC statement unless the wording switch was made, noting that negotiations are still ongoing, Reuters reported. That hedge matters. The IMFC statement is issued by consensus, and a single large shareholder pushing contested language can stall an otherwise routine document. Whether the US is prepared to spend diplomatic capital on a terminology fight — and whether other members will accept "super intelligence" in official texts written in multiple languages — remains an open question.
The IMF angle is not accidental. The fund and its shareholders have spent much of 2026 assessing how artificial intelligence reshapes labor markets, capital allocation, and financial stability. Terminology that appears in an IMFC statement tends to cascade into national policy documents, central bank communications, and regulatory consultations across dozens of economies. Whoever controls the phrase controls, to some extent, the framing of the policy debate that follows.
From Executive Order to Global Vocabulary
The international campaign is an extension of a domestic directive. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order requiring US government agencies to use "super intelligence" instead of "artificial intelligence" when referring to the technology, and instructed agencies to stop acknowledging the older term in official communications. At a White House roundtable held the same day, senior tech executives signed an accord endorsing the change — an event that drew attention after the signed document reportedly contained a typo in its own title.
The rename has since propagated through the federal government. The Justice Department has ordered staff to replace "AI" with "super intelligence" in its own materials under the executive order, and the Treasury's push at the IMF signals that the administration intends the terminology to travel. Speaking to Reuters, Browne framed the change as a matter of accuracy, saying the new moniker better reflects the emerging technology.
Why Critics Say the Term Collides With Itself
The rebrand has run into resistance from an unexpected quarter: the AI research community itself. As Axios has reported, "superintelligence" already carries a distinct and loaded meaning in AI discourse — it is the term long used to describe hypothetical systems that surpass human capabilities across virtually every domain, and it fuels debates over whether the most advanced systems should be slowed or stopped outright. Collapsing today's commercial AI systems and that speculative future into a single government-approved phrase, critics argue, blurs precisely the distinction policymakers most need to keep clear.
Legal analysts have flagged concrete complications as well. Forbes reported earlier this month that the renaming raises questions about federal contracts, regulations, and the legal consequences of redefining the technology mid-stream: statutes, procurement documents, and compliance frameworks refer to "artificial intelligence" by name, and an abrupt terminology switch creates ambiguity about which systems fall under which rules. International adoption would multiply those problems, since translations of "super intelligence" would need to be reconciled with existing legal terms in dozens of jurisdictions.
A Rapid Domestic Rollout
The timeline of the domestic change explains the urgency of the international one. The renamings began in late September, when Trump first pressed world leaders and US agencies to adopt the term, according to Axios. The Week reported that the president then signed an executive order directing the federal government to replace "artificial intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" across the executive branch, with agencies told to stop acknowledging the older terms. At a White House roundtable the same day, senior tech executives signed an accord embracing the change — a document that reportedly contained its own embarrassment, after the Deccan Herald noted a typo in its title.
Since then the directive has filtered downward through the federal bureaucracy. The Justice Department has ordered its own staff to make the switch in departmental materials, and the administration even floated — then discarded — a dedicated "super intelligence" czar role, which Trump confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would not fill, according to the Washington Examiner. The IMF campaign is the first clear signal that the administration intends the vocabulary change to be foreign policy rather than just domestic housekeeping.
The Diplomatic Arithmetic
Renaming a technology in an international consensus document is harder than doing so by executive order. IMFC statements are negotiated among 190 member countries, and several major US partners — including the EU, China, and Japan — have staked their own institutional language on "artificial intelligence," a term embedded in everything from the EU AI Act to national AI strategies. Translators face their own problem: "super intelligence" has no settled equivalent in many of the IMF's working languages, and some translations could carry connotations the English phrase does not.
Browne's refusal to say whether the US would block a statement without the new wording leaves room for compromise — alternative phrasings, a footnote, or a pilot use in one annex. But it also signals that Washington is willing to be the holdout. For an institution that usually fights over quotas and climate language, a fight over two words is unusual, and the outcome will be watched as a test of how much soft-power friction the terminology push is worth.
What to Watch Next
The immediate test is the IMFC statement itself. If US negotiators hold firm and the language survives, expect "super intelligence" to begin appearing in IMF and G20 documents within weeks, followed by pressure on bilateral partners to align. If other shareholders push back, the administration faces a choice between spending political capital on the wording or settling for a domestic rebrand that stops at the water's edge.
For companies, the more practical consequence is compliance churn. Firms that sell to governments will need to track how procurement language evolves on both sides of the rename, and multinationals face the prospect of describing the same technology with different official terms in different markets. Terminology, ordinarily the dullest corner of policy, has become the message itself — and the IMF negotiations will show whether the rest of the world is willing to repeat it.
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