Trump Bans 'AI' Term, Renames It 'Super Intelligence' — SkimNews
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Trump signed an executive order at a White House lunch with top AI leaders declaring "artificial intelligence" a forbidden term and mandating the government use "Super Intelligence" instead, following hints he dropped in a September 23 UN speech.
- Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk were all in the room, and not a single one objected to renaming a 70-year-old field — a silence Levy and author Jacob Weisberg frame as a failed "backbone test" and a classic Trump loyalty test.
- In exchange for their acquiescence, the executives walked out with a self-regulation framework from the White House rather than mandatory oversight, though Levy argues their inability to defend even basic terminology casts doubt on whether voluntary safety standards will hold.
- Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized "superintelligence" in his 2014 book, told Levy the swap makes no scientific sense — superintelligence refers narrowly to systems that "greatly surpass all the best human brains," a category that excludes email spam filters, spell checkers, and early chess engines.
- Governor Gavin Newsom countered with his own executive order keeping the term "artificial intelligence" in official California use, described in the piece as deliberate "Trump-trolling."
- Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI all failed to respond when Levy asked whether they would change "AI" in their product names, research papers, and communications — or, in the case of OpenAI and xAI, change their company names.
- Trump justified the change by saying the word "artificial" makes intelligence "fake" — a logic Levy connects to his recent decision to bounce CNN, Politico, and MSNow from the White House press corps as institutions whose output he calls "fake news."
Why it matters: The executives in that room collectively command trillions in market cap and have spent four years building their public identities around the term "artificial intelligence" — yet none pushed back when Trump unilaterally banned it. The immediate consequence is concrete: they secured voluntary self-regulation over strict federal oversight, but their silence on a trivial naming demand foreshadows the fortitude problem Levy flags — voluntary safety standards require executives willing to prioritize safety over competitive pressure, and this episode offers no evidence those executives will.
Ask SkimNews
