Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Rebrand Unlikely to Gain Traction With Tech Industry

President Trump stood before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday and announced a decision that caught the technology world off guard: he wants to stop calling it artificial intelligence. The term, he said, makes the technology sound false. From now on, he declared, it should be called super intelligence—SI for short. "Welcome to the new world of super intelligence," he told the assembly in New York.

The rebrand came after Trump polled his followers on Truth Social, offering them a choice among several alternatives: superior intelligence, extreme intelligence, supreme intelligence, and super intelligence. The last one won. Trump then instructed that all US government documents—and ideally the world's—adopt the new terminology. It was presented as a straightforward correction, a matter of accuracy and clarity.

But within hours, experts began pushing back. The problem, they explained, is that super intelligence already has a meaning in academic and research circles. The term, popularized more than a decade ago by philosopher and author Nick Bostrom, refers to a hypothetical system with cognitive abilities that surpass human intelligence across every domain. It remains theoretical. No such system exists. By applying the label to today's AI—which operates within narrow, specific domains and requires constant human oversight—Trump's rebranding conflates what we have now with something far more advanced and consequential. Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, called the move misleading. "I doubt 'SI' will stick, in part because it exaggerates the current capacities of AI," he said. A true superintelligent system, he added, would represent "the most consequential technology ever made." Current AI platforms do not approach that threshold.

Computer scientist Kokil Jaidka at the National University of Singapore made a similar point: the new name borrows prestige from a term researchers have reserved for something much larger. Ben Leong, also a computer science lecturer at NUS, suggested that professionals would likely want to preserve SI for a genuinely advanced level of AI, not for the systems in use today. "It doesn't feel like it's at that level yet," he said.

Yet within Trump's immediate circle, adoption began almost immediately. Ethan Klein, the US Chief Technology Officer, posted on social media: "The Super Intelligence (SI) President has spoken! The United States is and will remain the global leader in SI." Michael Waltz, Trump's ambassador to the UN, echoed the language in public remarks. But the broader technology industry showed little enthusiasm. When asked about the rebrand, Canada's minister of AI, Evan Solomon, offered a pointed response: "Canadians are not enthusiastic, at all, about renaming things"—a reference to Trump's earlier decision to rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico on US maps and in federal communications.

The timing of the announcement is notable. In recent weeks, prominent tech executives and researchers have called on the US government to regulate AI, citing concerns that the technology could pose risks to humanity. Trump has dismissed these warnings as a hoax. He has argued against regulation, framing it as a competitive disadvantage in the race against China. "We're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way," he said. Whichever nation wins the competition in AI, he suggested, will win broadly. The rebranding announcement made no explicit connection to these regulatory debates, but it arrived in that context—a moment when the administration is resisting calls for oversight and emphasizing American technological dominance.