Trump Orders AI Renamed 'Super Intelligence' — Experts Balk

US President Donald Trump has ordered that all United States government documents stop using the term "artificial intelligence" and adopt "super intelligence" instead — a rebranding that leading researchers told the BBC is misleading and unlikely to gain traction in the industry.

"Welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI," Trump said during a wide-ranging speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.

"From this point forward, all of United States' documents, and hopefully the world's, will be changed to use the more accurate term 'super' as opposed to 'artificial'. So it's 'super intelligence," the president said.

Trump explained his reasoning bluntly: the term artificial intelligence makes the technology "sound fake."

The name did not come from a policy process. It came from a poll. In the past week, Trump asked his social media followers to vote on alternatives including superior intelligence, extreme intelligence and supreme intelligence. After a series of polls on his Truth Social platform, super intelligence came out as the winner.

The move follows Trump's earlier rebranding of Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico on US maps and in federal communications.

Why experts push back

The problem, according to specialists, is that "super intelligence" already has a specific meaning — and today's AI does not meet it.

AI refers to computer technology that allows machines to perform tasks that usually require human thinking. Super intelligence, by contrast, describes a hypothetical "intellect" superior to humans in all forms. The term is often linked to the author and philosopher Nick Bostrom, who defined the idea more than a decade ago. No such system exists.

The rebranding is "misleading," said Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at The University of Melbourne, because super intelligence typically refers to a system with the ability to improve itself.

"I doubt 'SI' will stick, in part because it exaggerates the current capacities of AI," Coghlan said. "A superintelligent system, if it came about, would be regarded by experts as the most consequential technology ever made."

Computer scientist Kokil Jaidka said "not all AI platforms today exude super intelligence," adding that the new name "borrows the prestige of a term researchers reserve for a much bigger leap."

Ben Leong, a computer science lecturer at the National University of Singapore, put it in terms of professional incentives: "My guess is that professionals will want to save 'SI' for a higher level of AI, not so much to describe AI today. It doesn't feel like it's at that level yet."

The White House adopts the term anyway

Some in Trump's circle have moved quickly to adopt the language.

"The Super Intelligence (SI) President has spoken! The United States is and will remain the global leader in SI," US Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein wrote on social media.

Trump's ambassador to the UN, Michael Waltz, backed the change: "If you didn't see the president's speech, it's now super intelligence. I think he's absolutely right."

Not everyone is following. Canada's minister of AI, Evan Solomon, offered a pointed refusal when asked about the new name: "Canadians are not enthusiastic, at all, about renaming things" — an apparent reference to Trump renaming Lake Ontario.

Regulation fight in the background

The rebranding lands in the middle of a sharper policy fight. Top tech executives and researchers have in recent weeks called on the US government to regulate the industry over fears that AI could endanger humanity. Trump has dismissed those concerns as "a hoax."

He has argued against regulating the technology, saying the US cannot afford to hand China — its key technology rival — an advantage. Whichever side "wins AI, wins," Trump said.

"We're leading now over China by a lot, and everyone else, and we're going to keep it that way," he told the General Assembly. The US is not going to "stifle the growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution," he added. The government will "rein things in" if needed and lead the sector responsibly, Trump said.

The naming dispute is unlikely to end there. Trump is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, with AI expected to be on the agenda for the leaders of the world's two biggest economies — a conversation where the terminology, and the race it signals, will carry real economic stakes.