Trump wants to rebrand AI as ‘Super Intelligence’ — here’s what that actually means

On Tuesday, President Trump announced during an address to the United Nations General Assembly that the U.S. government would begin referring to artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence" or SI. He argued that the term "artificial" no longer accurately describes the technology and that all U.S. documents and presumably the world should adopt the more accurate term "super" instead.

Trump had been promoting this new terminology prior to his UN appearance, using it in a Truth Social post the previous day. The name change might seem superficial, but there's one major issue: "superintelligence" is already a term used in AI. It refers to an entirely different level of AI than what we have today. AI is a broad field encompassing various technologies, from narrow AI that performs specific tasks to artificial general intelligence (AGI) that could match human intellectual abilities across multiple domains.

But the next level, artificial superintelligence (ASI), is a theoretical step beyond AGI - a system whose abilities surpass those of humans across all intellectual domains. No such technology has been demonstrated yet. So, calling today's AI "superintelligence" doesn't change what the technology can actually do. The term change could lead to confusion, especially if government reports begin discussing the risks of "superintelligence".

Those risks could then be attributed to existing AI systems like ChatGPT and Gemini. Then there's the consumer perception issue. Current AI models are highly capable but still prone to errors and hallucinations. Calling them "superintelligence" might create a misleading impression of their capabilities. The president's speech also highlighted his opposition to international restrictions on U.S. AI development, positioning advanced AI as a technological race between the U.S. and China.