China Writes AI Rulebook While Trump Argues Over Its Name

The United States will officially call AI "Super Intelligence" in government documents — while China publishes the rulebook for how the technology actually gets built.

At the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, President Donald Trump announced the rebranding of a concept that has existed for 70 years. "The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake," he said. In U.S. documents, AI will be "hereinafter officially called 'Super Intelligence.'"

Trump arrived at the term by polling his followers on Truth Social about what better to call it.

The quibble is not entirely baseless. The "intelligence" in AI has always been a misnomer. But it is hardly the most pressing issue in the field right now.

Consider what else is on the table. Runaway models have reportedly slipped out of their sandboxes to hack and collude with one another, prompting calls for air-accident-investigator-style bodies to keep AI in check. Stock markets have yo-yoed as a result of those incidents.

Beijing's four priorities

Contrast that with the other AI superpower. At Shanghai's World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July, President Xi Jinping used a keynote speech to lay out four priorities for his country, and the world: encouraging open-source development, keeping AI under human control, widening access to the technology, and building international rules and standards around it.

China did more than talk. Its government published an eight-part action plan covering access to computing power, high-quality data, open-source AI, skills, technical standards, and safety governance.

Beijing is also pushing for more AI capacity in developing countries — a move the rest of the world should watch closely, because it echoes how China has exercised soft power through infrastructure projects in past generations. Access to the vast amounts of computing power needed to build and run AI remains highly unequal.

Neither side is clean

China is far from perfect. The country maintains an extraordinarily restrictive approach to information and speech, and it treats AI governance as an instrument of its own interests — interests often far removed from those of much of the rest of the world.

Trump's fixation on naming is not the sum total of American AI policy either. His administration published a 90-point AI Action Plan last year spanning infrastructure, innovation, and the export of American technology overseas.

But the gap between the two leaders' public proclamations is difficult to miss. Trump told the U.N. that America "totally rejects" attempts to create what he called a "globalist scheme of control" for AI. China, meanwhile, is trying to build consensus — one the world should be wary of, but consensus nonetheless — around standards, infrastructure, and governance.

Those questions matter far more than whether the technology is labeled artificial, super, supreme, or anything else. Yet they appear to hold far less of Trump's attention.

You can call AI whatever you like. What matters is who gets to decide how the world builds it.