Trump Responds to AI Backlash With ‘Super Intelligence’ Rebrand

President Donald Trump sees artificial intelligence as suffering from a branding problem, and he intends to fix it with an attempt to officially rename the technology “super intelligence.”

Hours after hosting nearly two-dozen Silicon Valley leaders at the White House for a lunch to discuss AI risks, the president signed an executive order Tuesday requiring federal government agencies to refer to the technology as “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in all official communications.

“As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of Super Intelligence,” the order reads.

The change of name is aimed at shifting increasingly negative public perceptions of AI, whose rollout across the US has sparked a nationwide backlash over concerns that it’s driving up electricity prices and costing Americans’ jobs. A Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday found that 71% of those surveyed preferred stricter AI guardrails while 73% said they would oppose construction of a new data center in their community.

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In the face of that opposition, Trump has stood behind developing the technology at full speed. Since his return to office last year, he has aligned with the AI industry and made artificial intelligence a centerpiece of his economic agenda, casting it as pivotal for the US to maintain its edge over China as a matter of national security.

Yet renaming AI as “super intelligence” creates another potential branding challenge within the tech industry. AI developers have long referred to super intelligence as a hypothetical level of AI where a model’s capabilities significantly outperform humans across a wide range of fields, including science and social skills, and have the ability to improve themselves without human input.

For now, even the most advanced AI models on the market today fall well short of that level of performance. Even so, fears that an extremely sophisticated system could gain the ability to improve itself and slip beyond human control have spurred calls to rein in its development.

Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who aligns with Democrats, joined Democratic Representative Greg Casar of Texas in unveiling a bill that would put a mandatory pause on development and deployment of superintelligent AI until the creation of a specialized federal agency to oversee the technology. While the 19-page measure stands little chance of winning passage in a bitterly divided Congress, it nonetheless signals growing concerns about AI safety risks.

It’s unclear whether tech industry leaders would embrace the change, though in Trump’s presence following the event, a few attendees including SpaceXAI Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk adopted the new moniker when talking about the technology, correcting himself to say “SI” instead of AI.

“The name has been officially changed by the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world at this,” Trump said in a post-lunch appearance with attendees. “We’re using the word super because the other word is a fake word.”