Trump Wants AI Rebranded “Super Intelligence.” The Internet Has Thoughts
President Donald Trump has a new term he’d like the government to use instead of “artificial intelligence,” and it’s already sparking plenty of jokes online.
What Trump Actually Said
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said he wants future US government documents to swap “artificial intelligence” for “super intelligence,” or “SI,” arguing the word “artificial” makes the technology sound fake when, in his words, it’s “actually amazing.” He capped off the remarks by welcoming the crowd to “the new world of super intelligence.”
No formal executive order has followed yet, and a White House spokesperson simply pointed back to the president’s UN comments when asked for more detail.
A Rebrand Three Days in the Making
The UN speech wasn’t the first sign of the shift. Trump was still using the term “AI” just days earlier while pitching an “AI Force” as a companion to the Space Force. Then, on Truth Social and X, he ran a pair of polls asking the public to choose a replacement term, first from “superior intelligence,” “extreme intelligence,” or “supreme intelligence,” then narrowing it down to “super intelligence” versus “superior intelligence.” “Super” ultimately won by a thin margin.
This isn’t the administration’s first attempt at renaming something. Past moves have included redesignating the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America.
Why Tech Insiders Are Wincing
The bigger issue for the AI industry is that “superintelligence” already means something specific. In AI research, it refers to a hypothetical system that can outthink and outperform humans across the board, a term tied to serious debates about AI safety and existential risk. Repurposing it as a government rebrand for AI broadly risks muddying a distinction researchers have spent years trying to keep clear.
The Internet Reacts
Social media wasted no time turning the announcement into a meme factory. Commenters joked about China developing “Super Duper Intelligence,” worried aloud about what a “super” rebrand would mean for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and speculated the president might have squeezed his own name into the term somewhere. Others drew comparisons to the “fetch” scene from Mean Girls, noted that SI spells “sí” in Spanish, and pointed out that a name change doesn’t address any of the underlying concerns about AI’s impact on jobs or society.
One post summed up the general mood: relabeling the technology doesn’t change what it does, whether you call it AI or SI.