Trump Orders Tech Giants to Rename AI as Super Intelligence

During a White House lunch, President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning the term 'artificial intelligence' from government use, replacing it with 'Super Intelligence.' The directive targets a 70-year-old term coined by John McCarthy in 1956, which currently yields about 7,420,000 results on Google Scholar. Trump argued that 'artificial' implies the technology is 'fake.' Despite the sudden shift, industry leaders in attendance—including Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, Dario Amodei, Greg Brockman, and Alex Karp—offered no objections to the change.

The silence of these executives suggests a strategic choice to prioritize self-regulation over semantic disputes. While companies like Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI have not confirmed whether they will rename their products, they face a bizarre branding dilemma. Meta currently markets Meta AI and AI glasses, though Zuckerberg recently established a Superintelligence Lab. Meanwhile, Microsoft's Satya Nadella previously floated the term 'different intelligence,' and California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a counter-executive order defending the traditional terminology.

For practitioners, the mandated terminology introduces significant scientific confusion. Philosopher Nick Bostrom, who popularized the term in his book 'Superintelligence,' noted that the phrase specifically describes systems that 'greatly surpass all the best human brains.' Applying it to the broader category of AI—which historically includes basic spam filters, spell checkers, early large language models, and 1970s chess engines—is technically inaccurate. Developers and researchers working with the federal government may now have to navigate bureaucratic compliance by adopting 'Super Intelligence' in grant proposals and technical documentation, even when describing rudimentary algorithms.