Trump Tells UN the US Is Renaming AI 'Super Intelligence,' Offers No Mechanism

Speaking Tuesday morning at the UN General Assembly, President Donald Trump said the United States is now "officially" renaming artificial intelligence to "super intelligence." The remark came during a wide-ranging address that also targeted Iran, climate change policy, "globalists," and transgender people, according to The Verge. No executive order, agency rule, or legislative text was cited to explain what "officially" meant or who had signed off on the change.

The naming claim arrived days after Trump posted a poll online inviting followers to weigh in on names for AI. "Super intelligence" was not among the options offered in that survey, which makes the announcement at the UN the first public indication that the term had been selected. The White House has not published any accompanying directive, and no federal agency has confirmed receiving instructions to alter terminology in official documents or procurement language.

Terminology in Washington does carry weight even without formal rulemaking. Federal agencies, grant programs, and defense contracts all use defined vocabulary, and a shift in preferred terms can ripple into budget lines, request-for-proposal language, and how vendors describe their products. If the rename were enforced, it would touch everything from NIST's AI risk framework to the Defense Department's sprawling AI portfolio. So far, there is no sign of that machinery moving.

The phrase "super intelligence" already has a specific meaning in the field: an artificial system that surpasses human cognitive performance across the board, a hypothetical capability that no one has demonstrated. Current commercial systems, including large language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Meta, are narrow tools that generate text, images, and code but do not approach general reasoning. Using the term for today's technology blurs a distinction researchers have drawn for years.

It is also unclear whether the administration intends the label as branding, as a policy signal, or as a genuine reclassification. Trump has previously signed executive orders on AI that emphasize domestic development and reduced regulation, but those documents used the standard term. Renaming a technology category by proclamation, without statutory or regulatory action, would not bind agencies or private companies.

What to watch next is whether any federal body actually adopts the term. A formal memo from the Office of Management and Budget, an update to agency style guides, or revised language in a contract solicitation would show the announcement has operational teeth. Absent that paper trail, the UN remark stands as a rhetorical flourish rather than a change in US policy, and the AI industry will keep calling its products what it has always called them.