Trump Renames AI 'Super Intelligence' as CEOs Sign Non-Binding Pact

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order requiring U.S. officials to stop calling it artificial intelligence — the official term is now "super intelligence." The rename landed alongside a voluntary AI safety agreement, the "Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities," signed at a White House gathering of the biggest names in the industry this week.

The guest list alone signaled the stakes. Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei all attended the luncheon, where they signed the pact alongside the president. Days earlier, such a meeting would have seemed unlikely: as TechCrunch's Anthony Ha noted on the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Trump had been saying "we don't need any of this, we need to lead in AI, we can't constrain it in any way" — and that "anyone who's saying that there's any danger from AI is essentially a Chinese or Democratic plant."

The reversal, and the speed of it, is what makes the story matter. The world's most valuable companies and the U.S. government publicly aligned around a framework for frontier AI in roughly two weeks — or, by some signs, even faster.

What did the executives actually sign?

Not much, by legal standards. Equity co-host Sean O'Kane called the agreement "completely voluntary" and "deeply non-binding." He also flagged a detail that suggests how rushed the process was: "they misspelled the United States on the agreement that they all signed."

Trump himself offered an unusual characterization of the document's force. As O'Kane put it: "Trump described it as quote 'morally binding,' which is just a level of abstraction and terminology that I've never heard of before."

For Ha, the substance of the pact matters less than the fact that it exists at all. "In terms of the agreement, it seems not super meaningful," he said. "What is meaningful is just the fact that they felt that this was something worth doing. As indicated by the fact that they misspelled United States, it seemed like they rushed to put all of this together. [But] the fact that this kind of gesture was needed seems significant, even if I don't think the agreement itself is going to lead to any major changes."

Why was Anthropic in the room?

The road to the luncheon ran through a late-night dinner. Just days before the event, Anthropic was, in Equity co-host Kirsten Korosec's words, "really in the doghouse" with the Trump administration. That changed when Dario Amodei was invited to a 10 p.m. dinner with the president.

"He had this sit-down, and then just days later, we had this luncheon, and at this luncheon, we have pretty much every tech power broker from every major tech company that exists," Korosec said.

O'Kane questioned how durable the repair actually is. He pointed to a Time magazine interview in which, he said, "your guess is as good as mine as to how informed he was that that dinner was even going to be happening." And he noted that hostility toward Anthropic persists inside the government: "the Defense Department is still very adamant that Anthropic is terrible and woke and a national security risk. Emil Michael goes off on Anthropic every other day on X, it seems. I think there's still some distance there despite Dario showing up to this thing."

Ha added context from prior reporting on the administration's internal splits over Anthropic. "The Treasury Secretary seemed to be a big fan, whereas the Defense Department — definitely not big fans, or at least unhappy with some of the conditions that Anthropic were trying to put on the use of their technology," he said. "There are people in the White House who want to use Anthropic's technology, want them involved in these decisions, and others who really, really, really, really don't."

Is 'super intelligence' a rebranding exercise?

Korosec argued the meeting's real significance was rhetorical, not regulatory — "a rebranding effort around AI," one that continued this weekend with Trump's announcement of a new Super Intelligence Force.

Her read of the message: "AI is going to kill us, it's scary, it is take jobs — but super intelligence is not." She was careful to frame it: "This isn't my personal belief. To me, that was the message."

Ha confirmed the rename is now official policy, not a suggestion. "If you're an official U.S. representative, you are supposed to say super intelligence, not artificial intelligence," he said. He also noted the shift was telegraphed in advance: "We were talking about this last week, because this is something [Trump has] been hinting at — he doesn't do hints, he's been saying [it] for a while."

Does the pact change anything?

All three hosts were skeptical. O'Kane's assessment was blunt on the legal emptiness of the document; Ha doubted it would drive "any major changes"; Korosec saw "a little bit of theater" in the executive order's regulatory pretensions — "I would say no" to whether it does any of that, she offered.

The post-event press conference, Korosec noted, "there's been many, many memes about, because of the interesting, funny behavior when you bring a bunch of tech CEOs together."

The stakes sit in the gap between gesture and enforcement. The United States has now produced a public alignment between the presidency and the frontier AI companies — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Amodei — around a commitment that carries no legal consequence and a misspelled header. Whether the Super Intelligence Force and the renamed terminology translate into policy, funding, or oversight machinery remains the open question the Equity team left unanswered.

For now, the industry has a new official vocabulary, a moral commitment, and a seat at the table. What it does not have, as O'Kane made clear, is anything binding.