US President Donald Trump wants the world to stop saying “artificial intelligence”. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday (September 22), Trump said the US will now officially call the technology “super intelligence”, or SI. His reason is simple: the word “artificial” makes it sound fake. It’s actually amazing,” he said.
“It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake.
On Saturday (September 19), Trump posted on X and Truth Social that “many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent. Computer scientist John McCarthy coined it in a 1955 proposal for a Dartmouth College conference, co-authored with Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky and Nathaniel Rochester. So the name he announced at the UN was not even on the original ballot.
The change, according to Trump, will cover all US government documents. “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,” he told the assembly. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t, we’re gonna find out pretty soon,” he said. “Superior Intelligence” took an early lead with around 39% of the vote and later crossed 41%. Then, on Monday, Trump ran a second poll that pitted “Superior Intelligence” against a new entry, “Super Intelligence”. The new option won comfortably, and Trump started using “SI” in his posts almost immediately. Trump also lumped AI safety warnings with climate change and the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has since proposed a plan to “pace the frontier”, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk appeared to back. “Artificial intelligence” itself has no legal status that a president can overwrite. At the time, rival labels such as “automata studies” and “complex information processing” were also doing the rounds. “AI” won, and it has stuck for 70 years.
There is no word yet on when the switch will happen or how it will be carried out. Trump himself did not sound too sure. “Let’s see if I have any power. The idea did not come out of nowhere. He then asked followers to vote on three options: Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence and Supreme Intelligence. The comments come after an Anthropic researcher resigned, saying leading AI companies believe the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade. It is even part of company names like OpenAI.
Earlier in the week, he had called the backlash against AI a hoax pushed by his political rivals.