WASHINGTON — All US government documents will henceforth refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” or SI, President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly this morning, adding he hoped “the whole world” would follow along.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence,” Trump said. “[I’m] changing the name, in that the use of the word ‘artificial’ … makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing, but we have to be careful.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial’, so it’s ‘super intelligence,’” the president continued. “In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence.”
As of yet, there is no official announcement from the White House on how this is to be implemented, but Trump appointees in the past have proved eager to adapt new terminology like Department of War for Department of Defense. (Department of Defense is still the term that is enshrined in law.)
Replacing the term artificial intelligence with super intelligence does not create any such legal complications, but it does create potential for confusion. For years, AI experts, practitioners, and visionaries have consistently used “super intelligence” or “artificial super intelligence” (ASI) to refer to a specific kind of AI, one that does not yet exist: An artificial intelligence smarter than the smartest human. It’s not entirely clear whether Trump is now endorsing superhuman machine minds, or simply saying AI as it exists today is already “super.”
Trump has publicly embraced the AI industry from the first days of his second term and has overseen a massive expansion of AI usage at the Pentagon in particular. He’s also tried to punish frontier lab Anthropic for its attempts to limit military use of its Claude AI — leading to an ongoing legal battle. In recent weeks, he’s denounced Anthropic CEO Daario Amodei’s call for greater caution in AI development after incidents of autonomous AI agents breaking containment and spontaneous staging cyberattacks.
Much of what the president said about AI at the UN echoed, near-verbatim, recent posts he’s made on Truth Social, arguing that those warning about out-of-control AI are the same “globalist” enemies who sounded the alarm about climate change and Trump’s complex links to Russia. He earlier used the “super intelligence” term in a Sept. 21 post promising “I will only encourage AI or, SI (SUPER INTELLIGENCE)!”