Trump Renames AI 'Super Intelligence,' CEOs Stay Silent — 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 AI industry leaders declaring "artificial intelligence" a "verboten coinage" and replacing it with "super intelligence," after first floating the idea in a September 23 UN speech where he argued "the word 'artificial' makes intelligence fake."
- Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk all attended the lunch; not one objected to the name change, according to author Steven Levy, who frames their silence as a failed "backbone test."
- Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term "superintelligence" in his 2014 book, told Levy the swap makes no scientific sense because superintelligence refers to systems that "greatly surpass all the best human brains," not to spam filters, spell checkers, or early LLMs.
- California Governor Gavin Newsom countered with his own executive order defending the use of "artificial intelligence" — a move Levy describes as "Trump-trolling" that further isolates the White House's linguistic edict.
- The executives walked away with voluntary self-regulation in place of strict federal oversight, but Levy argues the deal's credibility is undermined by their willingness to surrender the foundational vocabulary of their industry on the president's whim.
Why it matters: The same executives who are supposed to police themselves on AI safety just agreed — silently — to discard 70 years of technical terminology on a presidential whim, casting doubt on whether their self-regulation pledge has any backbone when it collides with political pressure.
Ask SkimNews
