Super intelligence is, as of 22 September 2026, the term the United States government says it will use in place of artificial intelligence. President Donald Trump announced the change from the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, and the White House put the sentence into its own written readout of the speech, which is what turns an aside into a policy.
The published line is short and unusually specific about its own legal effect. “The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for the Artificial Intelligence being spoken of so much now — hereinafter officially called ‘Super Intelligence.'” The word hereinafter is doing more work in that sentence than the rename itself.
Trump’s stated reason was aesthetic rather than technical. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake,” he said, adding that “many people think that the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’ are inaccurate, and very ineloquent.” He also supplied an abbreviation: SI, to replace AI.
This article sets out exactly what was said, what the phrase super intelligence already means in the technical literature, which documents a presidential rename can and cannot reach, and why the second half of the same sentence — the rejection of international AI oversight — is the part with measurable consequences.
Table of contents
- What Trump Actually Said About Super Intelligence
- Super Intelligence Already Has a Technical Definition
- What a Federal Rename Can and Cannot Change
- The Rejection of International Oversight Is the Bigger Story
- The Climate Comparison and What It Implies
- The Precedent: Gulf of America and Lake America
- Why “Artificial” Was Never the Weak Word
- A Short History of Renaming in Computing
- The Compliance Cost of a Terminology Change
- What to Watch Next
- Five Questions the Super Intelligence Rename Leaves Open
- Frequently Asked Questions About the Super Intelligence Rename
- Super Intelligence: The Verdict
- References
What Trump Actually Said About Super Intelligence
The speech covered Iran, the International Criminal Court, immigration and the Western Hemisphere before it reached technology. The super intelligence passage arrived as part of a broader rejection of what the President called global government.
The sentence as the White House published it
The White House release, titled “President Trump at the United Nations: While Others Have Talked, I Have Acted,” carries the rename as a subordinate clause attached to a rejection. That matters for interpretation: the super intelligence rename was not announced as a standalone initiative with an implementation date, an owning agency or a review. It was announced as a parenthesis inside a sovereignty argument.
The argument from eloquence
Trump’s objection was to the adjective, not the noun. “Artificial” made the thing sound fake, he said, when “it’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful.” Under that reading, super intelligence is a truth-in-labelling correction — the technology is impressive, so the name should say so.
The competitive framing
The rest of the passage was about winning. “Whoever wins AI — and now I say whoever wins SI, whoever wins superintelligence, wins,” Trump said, adding that the United States is “leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. We’re going to keep it that way.” He committed to non-interference in plain terms: “We will only encourage superintelligence. We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in,” with oversight left to the Department of Justice rather than a new regulator.
Super Intelligence Already Has a Technical Definition
The awkwardness of the rename is not that it is new. It is that super intelligence is one of the few terms in the field with a reasonably settled meaning, and the meaning is not “AI”.
Where the term comes from
In the AI safety literature, superintelligence denotes a system that substantially exceeds the best human performance across essentially all cognitive domains. It sits at the top of a ladder whose lower rungs — narrow systems, general systems, human-level systems — are defined by what they cannot yet do. Applying super intelligence to a spam filter and to a hypothetical system that outthinks every human institution flattens the ladder into a single word.
The ladder the rename removes
The distinctions below are not academic hair-splitting. They are the load-bearing categories in export control lists, model evaluation thresholds, insurance wordings and the compute reporting rules that several jurisdictions now run on.
| Tier | Usual definition | Exists today? | What the rename calls it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narrow AI | Strong performance in one bounded task | Yes, ubiquitous | Super intelligence |
| Frontier or general models | Broad capability, uneven reliability | Yes, a few dozen | Super intelligence |
| AGI | Human-level across most cognitive work | Disputed, not demonstrated | Super intelligence |
| Superintelligence (ASI) | Exceeds the best humans in all domains | No | Super intelligence |
Why the collapse is not harmless
A rule that says “super intelligence systems above a compute threshold must report” is readable when the term picks out a tier. When the term picks out everything from autocomplete to a hypothetical successor species, the same sentence stops constraining anything. The practical risk of the rename is not embarrassment; it is that drafting becomes harder for the people who write American rules about these systems.
What a Federal Rename Can and Cannot Change
Presidential terminology decisions travel unevenly. The Gulf of America order in January 2025 reached federal maps quickly and private mapping products slowly, and never reached the International Hydrographic Organization at all. The same layered outcome is the realistic forecast for super intelligence.
| Where the term appears | Changed by a presidential rename? | Mechanism required |
|---|---|---|
| White House releases and speeches | Immediately | Editorial instruction |
| Agency style guides and web copy | Within weeks | Departmental memo |
| Executive orders and OMB guidance | On reissue only | New order or revision |
| Statutes passed by Congress | No | Amending legislation |
| NIST and ISO standards text | No | Standards revision cycle |
| Treaties and UN resolutions | No | Multilateral negotiation |
| Private contracts and vendor terms | No | Renegotiation |
The two-vocabulary problem
The predictable outcome of that table is a period in which American federal prose says super intelligence while American law, American standards and every international text the United States is party to still say artificial intelligence. Anyone drafting a compliance document will have to carry both terms, and anyone drafting a contract will have to define which one governs.
The search and retrieval cost
Terminology changes also break retrieval. Agency search tools, procurement portals and document management systems are keyword-driven; a corpus split across two names for the same subject returns fewer of the right results to the people who most need them. That is a small, real and entirely self-inflicted cost.
The Rejection of International Oversight Is the Bigger Story
Strip the rename out of the sentence and what remains is a policy position with a year of history behind it. The United States “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control” over these systems.
What exists to reject
In August 2025 the General Assembly agreed to create two mechanisms: an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, modelled loosely on the climate assessment panels, and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Both launched at the September 2025 General Assembly, where the Secretary-General said the Dialogue would “lay cornerstones of a global AI ecosystem.”
The 2025 precedent
American rejection is not new. In September 2025 the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, said the United States “totally reject[s] all efforts by international bodies to assert centralized control.” The 2026 speech restates that position at head-of-state level and attaches the rename to it.
Who is on the other side
China’s Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu has said Beijing supports “the U.N. playing a central role in AI governance,” and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described the UN as “the legitimate forum to forge consensus.” The disagreement is therefore not the United States against a vague internationalism; it is a specific split over whether assessment of these systems should be pooled.
The Climate Comparison and What It Implies
The most substantive part of the passage was the analogy Trump chose to justify non-intervention. He compared warnings about these systems to climate warnings, invoking “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming” and noting that “nobody was dead.”
The structure of the argument
The argument is that a category of expert prediction has a poor track record, so the current category of expert prediction should be discounted. It is an argument about the credibility of forecasters rather than about the mechanisms they describe, which is why it does not engage with any specific claim about what a super intelligence system might do.
Why it lands differently here
Climate projections are produced by a standing international assessment body with a published methodology. Claims about frontier systems are currently produced by the laboratories building them and by a small number of external evaluators. That asymmetry is exactly what the UN scientific panel was created to address — and it is the mechanism the same sentence rejects.
The Precedent: Gulf of America and Lake America
The super intelligence rename is the third high-profile renaming of this administration, and the first aimed at a technology rather than a place.
| Rename | Announced | Instrument | Adopted outside the US? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America | January 2025 | Executive order | No |
| Lake Ontario to Lake America | August 2026 | Announcement | No |
| Artificial intelligence to super intelligence | September 2026 | Speech plus White House release | Not so far |
The difference that matters
Places have a single custodian for their names within a territory. A field of research does not. Nobody has to accept the phrase super intelligence for a paper to be published, a model card to be written or a standard to be balloted, which is why adoption outside federal prose is genuinely uncertain rather than merely slow.
Why "Artificial" Was Never the Weak Word
The objection Trump raised — that “artificial” implies fake — reverses the word’s ordinary technical sense.
Artificial means made, not counterfeit
In engineering usage, artificial denotes human manufacture: artificial harbours, artificial fibres, artificial joints. None of those are fakes. The 1955 Dartmouth proposal that coined the field’s name used the adjective in exactly that sense, to distinguish machine-made cognition from the biological kind.
Intelligence was always the contested half
The word doing the heavy lifting in the original phrase is the noun. Whether current systems are intelligent, and in what sense, remains the live argument; techniques such as reinforcement learning produce behaviour that is goal-directed without anyone claiming it is understanding. Renaming the adjective leaves the contested noun untouched and adds a superlative on top of it.
The upgrade problem
Calling everything super intelligence also removes the vocabulary you would need if a genuinely more capable class of system arrived. There is no obvious word left. That is a small point of craft, but naming schemes that cannot express an upgrade tend not to survive contact with the technology they describe.
A Short History of Renaming in Computing
The field has been renamed before, repeatedly, and the pattern of those renames is a useful guide to what happens next.
Cybernetics to artificial intelligence
The 1955 Dartmouth Summer Research Project proposal introduced “artificial intelligence” partly to mark a break from cybernetics, which carried a rival research programme and a rival set of personalities. The new name won because the people using it produced the work, not because anyone decreed it.
Artificial intelligence to machine learning
Through the funding droughts of the late 1980s and 1990s, researchers and companies systematically avoided the phrase artificial intelligence in grant applications and product literature, preferring machine learning, statistical pattern recognition or data mining. The rename was defensive, bottom-up, and effective: it survived because it described a narrower and more defensible claim.
Cognitive computing and the branded rename
The clearest failed case is the vendor-branded rename. Around 2011 a major vendor pushed “cognitive computing” hard as a replacement term, with substantial marketing behind it. It never displaced the underlying vocabulary, because researchers kept publishing under the old term and buyers kept searching for it. Super intelligence enters the same contest from a different direction — with state backing rather than vendor backing, but with the same requirement that other people voluntarily adopt it.
What the pattern predicts
Renames in this field succeed when they are adopted by the people producing the primary literature and fail when they are imposed on it. Nothing about a presidential announcement changes that mechanism, which is why the realistic forecast for super intelligence is high adoption in American government prose and low adoption in papers, model cards and standards.
The Compliance Cost of a Terminology Change
For organisations with American federal exposure, super intelligence is now a documentation question rather than a philosophical one.
Contracts and definitions clauses
Any agreement that defines “artificial intelligence” by reference to a US government definition needs checking. If the referenced source is renamed or reissued under the new term, the definition can drift without anyone renegotiating. The cheap fix is to pin definitions to a dated standard rather than to a living government page, an approach that also survives the next rename.
Policies, registers and model inventories
Internal AI registers, acceptable-use policies and risk registers should carry both terms for search purposes. Teams building governance artefacts can borrow structure from an existing AI strategy rather than starting a parallel vocabulary, and should record which external definition each control maps to.
Public communications
Organisations that publish to both American and international audiences now face a genuine style decision. There is no neutral option: using super intelligence in a technical document signals alignment with a policy position, and refusing it signals the opposite. Most publishers will keep artificial intelligence in technical prose and quote the new term where they are reporting the American position.
What to Watch Next
Three signals will tell you whether super intelligence becomes a real term of art or stays a rhetorical flourish.
Does an executive order use it operatively?
A rename that appears in the operative text of an order — in definitions, thresholds or agency instructions — behaves very differently from one that appears in speeches. Watch the next AI-related order for whether the phrase super intelligence appears in a definitions section.
Does NIST adopt it?
The standards body is the pivot. If the American standards vocabulary changes, international standards bodies face a harmonisation decision; if it does not, the rename stays a federal communications convention and nothing more.
Does the hotline survive the vocabulary?
Officials indicated a US-China communication channel on these systems is under consideration, with the Treasury Secretary expected to bring details forward. A bilateral technical channel needs shared definitions to function. Whether it is drafted in the language of super intelligence or of artificial intelligence will say more about the rename’s reach than any speech.
Five Questions the Super Intelligence Rename Leaves Open
The announcement answered none of the questions an implementing agency would need answered before changing a single document.
Which agencies are covered?
“All United States documents” is not an administrative category. Independent agencies, the legislative branch and federally funded research centres each have their own publication rules, and none of them takes editorial direction from a speech.
Is the term one word or two?
The White House release capitalises it as two words, “Super Intelligence”. The President said “superintelligence” as one word in the same passage, and the existing technical literature uses the single-word form. A style instruction that cannot settle its own orthography will be applied inconsistently from the first day.
Does it replace the abbreviation everywhere?
Swapping AI for SI collides with established abbreviations in other federal domains, including systems engineering and statistical publications. Abbreviation collisions are the usual reason a rename stalls inside large organisations, because they break existing document templates.
What happens to bodies with AI in their name?
Institutes, offices and advisory committees carry the old term in their legal names. Renaming those requires the instrument that created them, not a speech, and several were created by statute.
Does the rename apply retroactively?
No mechanism was described for existing published documents. The realistic answer is that the archive keeps the old term and new documents use the new one, which produces exactly the split corpus described above.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Super Intelligence Rename
Is artificial intelligence now illegal to say in the United States?
No. The announcement is a statement of government usage preference. It creates no obligation on private companies, researchers, publishers or state governments, and it carries no penalty.
Does this change any AI law or regulation?
No. Statutes, existing executive orders and agency rules keep the wording they were written with until each is separately amended or reissued. A rename announced in a speech has no independent legal effect on those texts.
Has any other country adopted the term?
Not at the time of writing. The rename was announced to an international audience but framed as a matter of American usage, and no other delegation has said it will follow.
Why do researchers object to calling everything super intelligence?
Because superintelligence already denotes the top tier of a capability ladder that current systems have not reached. Using it for all systems removes the word researchers use to describe a specific hypothetical, and makes safety claims harder to state precisely.
What should organisations actually do about it?
Very little, and deliberately. Add the new term as a search alias in document systems, check any contract that defines these systems by reference to a US government source, and otherwise keep technical prose in the vocabulary that standards bodies and journals still use.
Super Intelligence: The Verdict
The rename itself is cheap to announce, impossible to enforce outside federal prose, and costly in exactly one respect: it spends a precise technical term on an imprecise general one. Anyone who needs to distinguish a classifier from a hypothetical successor system now has one fewer word to do it with.
The rejection of international oversight in the same sentence is the part that changes behaviour. It confirms that the United States will not participate in pooled assessment of frontier systems, a position it has held since 2025 and has now stated at the highest level available. That is a policy with consequences for how the rest of the world learns what these systems can do, and it would have been the story with or without a new name.
Readers following the wider governance argument may also want our coverage of whether the AI safety debate is about safety or control and of Dario Amodei’s call for pacing frontier development, both of which turn on the distinctions the super intelligence rename erases.
References
President Trump at the United Nations: While Others Have Talked, I Have Acted
Trump Rejects AI Regulation, Citing Parallels with Climate Change in UN Address
Trump says AI will be renamed super intelligence in all US documents
Trump rebrands AI, rejects globalist scheme to control tech
US rejects international AI oversight at UN General Assembly
Trump: AI to be referred to as super intelligence in official documents
