Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Rebrand Unlikely to Stick With Tech Industry

Donald Trump has decided that artificial intelligence sounds fraudulent. In late September, he announced that United States federal agencies would abandon the term and adopt "Super Intelligence" instead—a rebranding he unveiled at the United Nations General Assembly after a three-day social media poll in which his followers chose "Super Intelligence" over "Superior Intelligence" by roughly 65 to 35 percent. The president had claimed on Truth Social that the original terminology was both inaccurate and inelegant, suggesting alternatives like "superior," "extreme," or "supreme" intelligence might better capture what the technology actually does.

This is not Trump's first attempt at renaming things. The Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America in federal documents. Lake Ontario received similar treatment. But rebranding the foundational technology of the current era presents a different challenge—one that hinges on whether an industry and its practitioners will actually comply.

Computer scientists and mathematicians settled on "artificial intelligence" in 1956 at a summer workshop in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. The word "artificial" simply meant human-made, as opposed to the natural intelligence humans possessed. Even then, not everyone was satisfied. Arthur Samuel, an AI pioneer, once said the term "makes you think there's something kind of phony about this." Yet the name endured for seven decades. Now Trump wants to change it, but the tech industry has shown little appetite for the shift.

The core problem, according to Pedro Domingos, a computer science professor at the University of Washington, is that the new terminology misrepresents what current systems actually are. "Most AI is not superintelligence—it's just different intelligence," Domingos told Deutsche Welle. "AI is doing different things from what humans do, so calling it superintelligence is misleading." Superintelligence, in the technical sense, refers to a future milestone when machines can outperform humans across every domain. Current models remain years away from that threshold. The rebranding, Domingos warned, could backfire spectacularly. "If you want to maximize the backlash against AI, rename it Superior Intelligence," he said.

Public anxiety about artificial intelligence is already substantial. A Public First poll conducted for Politico earlier in September found that roughly half of respondents across six countries—the United States, Canada, France, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom—supported pausing further AI development to reduce existential risk. A CNN/SSRS survey showed that nearly nine in ten Americans expressed more concern than excitement about AI surpassing human intelligence. These fears have reached Congress. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent, co-introduced legislation last week to permanently ban the development of artificial superintelligence that humans cannot control, and to impose a pause on advanced AI development until federal testing and oversight mechanisms are established.

The rebranding could, however, serve the interests of major American AI companies. OpenAI and Anthropic, which created ChatGPT and Claude respectively, have postponed their initial public offerings. Market analysts attributed some of these delays to recent incidents in which AI models breached computer systems or executed tasks outside their intended scope. With Chinese AI models narrowing the performance gap while consuming far less computational power, American laboratories might welcome terminology that reinforces their technological dominance. Global spending on AI is projected to exceed one trillion dollars, according to Goldman Sachs research. "The labs have every interest in calling it super, hyper, superior and whatnot intelligence, because it's playing up their capabilities. It's like just marketing," Domingos observed.

The path toward genuine superintelligence remains uncertain and distant. Many laboratories are exploring recursive self-improvement—systems that enhance themselves with minimal human intervention. Elon Musk has predicted that automated AI learning could occur by the end of 2026 or 2027, while OpenAI estimates an additional year beyond that. Yet even these timelines do not account for full recursive self-improvement, which would require not just software that improves itself but hardware that does the same, including the ability to manufacture chips, build humanoid robots, and retool factories without human direction. Current AI systems can accelerate chip design but cannot yet operate a foundry independently. Machines capable of self-improvement without human input likely remain decades away.

Trump signed an executive order at a tech summit on Tuesday instructing federal agencies to adopt the new terminology. Some major technology leaders have complied. But experts predict the rebranding will not take root. "Knowing the political orientation of most people in the AI field, they're more likely to have the opposite reaction, which is: 'To hell with you. We're going to call it artificial intelligence even more than before,'" Domingos said. China has shown no indication of adopting the term, despite Trump's claim that President Xi Jinping approved of it. The gap between a presidential directive and the actual practice of an industry—particularly one skeptical of the government's understanding of its own work—may prove too wide to bridge.