Trump Renames AI to 'Super Intelligence,' Dismisses '12-Year' Doom Warnings

For the AI research community, 'superintelligence' is not a marketing term — it's a precise label for artificial superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical system that would surpass human cognition across every domain. By ordering all federal documents to call AI 'super intelligence,' the White House is collapsing that technical distinction, applying an existential-scale term to everything from recommendation systems to large language models. That matters because regulatory definitions and public framing flow from the language governments adopt.

On September 22, 2026, during his address to the United Nations General Assembly, President Donald Trump announced that the United States government will stop using the term "artificial intelligence" in official documents and replace it with "super intelligence." The change, delivered as a speech announcement rather than a documented executive action in the sources reviewed, is the latest and most symbolically loaded move in the administration's broader effort to reshape how the federal government talks about, and regulates, advanced technology. Trump's stated rationale was linguistic and rhetorical: he argued that the word "artificial" makes the technology "sound fake," when in fact, in his words, "it is not fake. It's actually amazing."

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By ordering all federal documents to call AI 'super intelligence,' the White House is collapsing that technical distinction, applying an existential-scale term to everything from recommendation systems to large language models.

This is not merely a branding exercise. Terminology in government documents carries operational weight. Federal procurement standards, agency guidance, NIST frameworks, export controls, and grant language all use "artificial intelligence" as a defined term with legal and contractual significance. A wholesale renaming would require revision across hundreds of documents and could create transitional ambiguity about whether existing rules governing "AI" continue to apply to the newly named "super intelligence." The announcement did not clarify whether this is a stylistic preference, an executive order mandate, or a legislative proposal, leaving federal agencies without a clear implementation path.

The renaming also collides with established technical vocabulary. In the AI research community, "superintelligence" is not a synonym for AI; it denotes artificial superintelligence (ASI), a hypothetical system that surpasses human cognitive performance in all domains, popularized by thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and central to existential-risk debates. Applying the term to all AI systems — from recommendation algorithms to large language models — conflates present-day narrow and general systems with a future capability that does not yet exist. For researchers and safety advocates, this matters because the terminology of regulation often determines the scope of regulation. If "super intelligence" is framed as inherently amazing and unstoppable, safety constraints may become harder to justify in policy debates.

The announcement also carried a substantive deregulatory message. Trump "emphasized that the U.S. will not restrict the growth of this technology," while adding that "the Justice Department will intervene if necessary." That formulation points to an enforcement-heavy, ex post approach rather than comprehensive ex ante regulation — consistent with the administration's earlier moves to unwind AI safety requirements in favor of an innovation-first posture. The DOJ caveat is notable: it suggests antitrust or consumer-protection enforcement may serve as the primary federal lever, rather than dedicated AI safety legislation.

Trump dismissed doomsday scenarios as exaggerated, comparing them to climate warnings: "The very same people who said we'd all be dead in 12 years because of global warming... are now saying that AI is going to kill us all." This rhetorical frame places AI existential-risk warnings in the same category as climate predictions he has long dismissed as hoaxes, signaling that the administration is unlikely to treat catastrophic-risk arguments as a basis for regulation in the near term.