What’s in a name? Why Trump wants to rebrand AI as ‘super intelligence’

South China Morning Post | Chong Ming Lee

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace the term "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" in official communications. This semantic shift aims to accelerate American technological development by framing the sector as a critical geopolitical race against China that the United States cannot afford to lose.

The directive formalises a rebranding effort initiated at the United Nations General Assembly, where the administration argued that the word "artificial" implies a lack of authenticity. Optics shape regulatory environments. While tech leaders like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang welcomed the change, California Governor Gavin Newsom opposed it, ordering state agencies to retain the original terminology. Meanwhile, Beijing has reacted cautiously, maintaining its pragmatic focus on standard artificial intelligence frameworks. Ultimately, this linguistic divergence complicates international governance efforts as Meta Platforms and other developers navigate conflicting federal and state-level definitions.

Comment

The White House directive to replace "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" introduces a significant conceptual misalignment with established industry taxonomies. By conflating current frontier models with the theoretical threshold of artificial general intelligence, the executive order risks distorting federal procurement standards and safety benchmarks. This linguistic inflation complicates compliance for developers like Nvidia and Meta Platforms, which already operate distinct research divisions such as Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Downstream, this semantic divergence will likely fracture international regulatory alignment within bodies like the International Organization for Standardization. As Washington codifies "super intelligence" into federal policy, bilateral safety channels established during the Trump-Xi summit in Washington risk operational friction over mismatched technical definitions. Consequently, multinational tech firms face a bifurcated compliance landscape where US federal contracts require adherence to "SI" metrics while European and Chinese regulators maintain standard "AI" protocols.

Strategic Question for Discussion

If the bilateral communication channels established during the Trump-Xi summit are forced to operate under conflicting definitions of 'super intelligence' and 'artificial intelligence', does the risk of miscalculating frontier model capabilities increase, or can technical protocols bypass political nomenclature?

The available evidence suggests that political nomenclature will inevitably complicate technical verification, as diplomatic hotlines require shared baseline metrics to assess incident severity. My assessment is that Chinese negotiators will exploit this semantic divergence to delay binding safety commitments, arguing that Washington's 'super intelligence' framework lacks objective scientific consensus. Consequently, operational coordination during a frontier model crisis is more likely to stall at the diplomatic level than at the engineering level.

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