Trump wants everyone to stop saying “artificial intelligence” and start saying super intelligence, and he says anyone who refuses is “THE ENEMY!”
In a Truth Social post on Thursday, October 8, Trump wrote, “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” He signed the post “President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
The post follows an executive order Trump signed on September 29, which directs federal agencies to use “super intelligence,” or “SI,” instead of “artificial intelligence,” or “AI,” in public statements, on government websites and in official reports. An executive order is a directive from the president that tells the federal government how to operate. It applies to federal agencies, not to private citizens or companies.
According to reporting on the order, it says the technology will be “hereinafter officially called super intelligence” because “use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake.” Trump signed the order after a lunch with tech leaders, including Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Before that, he ran a poll on Truth Social asking followers to choose between “Super Intelligence,” “Superior Intelligence” and “Extreme Intelligence.”
The order does not include any penalty for using the old term. Trump’s latest post also did not say what would happen to people or companies that keep saying “AI.”
Axios noted that the White House itself still uses “artificial intelligence,” including on the website for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. An earlier White House policy plan is also still titled America’s AI Action Plan.
Trump’s claim that super intelligence is the “highly accepted” term is also disputed. In the tech world, superintelligence has long meant something different: a hypothetical future form of AI that is smarter than humans at nearly everything. Axios pointed out that Trump’s rebrand blurs the line between that idea and the AI tools people use today, like chatbots and image generators.
Some of the biggest names in tech have adopted the new term anyway. Gizmodo reported that Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have all started using “super intelligence.”
