US President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that artificial intelligence will be renamed “super intelligence” in all US government documents.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter officially called super intelligence, changing the name,” Trump told the assembly.
He said the word “artificial” made the technology “sound fake”. “It is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports,” he said.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial,” Trump said. “In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence — SI.”
The announcement followed a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform on Saturday, in which he wrote that “many people” considered the term “Artificial Intelligence” to be “inaccurate” and “very ineloquent”. He proposed alternatives including “Superior Intelligence”, “Extreme Intelligence” and “Supreme Intelligence”, all abbreviated SI or EI.
Superintelligence is an existing term in the AI industry, defined as a form of artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. It is both the stated goal of several frontier AI companies and a source of concern among researchers who warn of its risks.
Trump’s remarks came amid heightened concern about AI safety after a former Anthropic researcher warned that the technology could soon pose a threat to humanity. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called for an AI slowdown after the former researcher accused the industry of “gambling with our lives”.
Trump dismissed such warnings in his address, comparing them to earlier predictions about climate change. “The very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming… are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us,” he said.
The comments add to a debate in Washington over whether to regulate AI, with Trump pushing for lighter regulation to keep the US ahead of China. “We’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. We’re going to keep it that way,” he said, adding that he did not intend to “stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution”.
AI featured prominently in discussions at the UN General Assembly this week, and is expected to be a topic when Chinese President Xi Jinping travels to Washington for a state visit with Trump.
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