Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Order: Why Linguists and Journalists Refuse the Term

A late-month executive order from the Trump administration now requires federal agencies to replace "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" in all official communication and policies. The White House framed the new term as better capturing AI's "promise, potential and rapidly advancing capabilities." For anyone covering this technology, the order is not a vocabulary update. It is a test of whether journalism adopts politically mandated language.

The stakes are concrete. Public trust in AI is already strained by job displacement fears and extinction-risk debates, and the rebrand arrives precisely as the industry seeks trillions in chips, power and server-farm investment. A term that makes the technology sound more capable than it is serves that market. It also obscures the technology's documented limits.

What does the order actually change?

President Donald Trump said Thursday on Truth Social that anyone who doesn't use his preferred term will be considered an "enemy" of the White House. The statement echoes Red Scare rhetoric. It implies that organizations, including the press, could face consequences for continuing to use "artificial intelligence" — a term that currently appears everywhere in policy, research and reporting.

The order follows a pattern of naming campaigns. Previous executive actions renamed the Gulf of America and Lake America; Google and Apple complied. Trump also renamed the Department of War, though CNET's newsroom continues to use "Department of Defense" per AP Stylebook guidance, which explicitly advises using the legal name until Congress acts otherwise.

Naomi Susan Baron, a linguist and author of the book Reader Bot: What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters, calls the redefinition both "Pollyannish and dangerous." The takeaway: this is language as an instrument of authority, not a response to how people actually speak.

Why do experts reject the term?

The core problem is precision. In technical AI circles, superintelligence (one word) refers to a hypothetical machine that far exceeds human cognitive ability — and experts still lack consensus on that definition. In the industry's conceptual timeline, it sits beyond artificial general intelligence, or AGI (the theoretical point where automated systems broadly match human proficiency and achieve actual reasoning). No deployed system meets either bar.

Conflating these terms makes today's technology sound far more powerful than it is. But even "artificial intelligence" carries problems of its own. Emily Bender, a professor of computational linguistics and a prominent voice in AI ethics, and her co-author Alex Hanna argue in their 2025 book The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want that lumping a heterogeneous set of technologies under "AI" — pattern-matching software, robotics, narrow automation tools, statistical and generative models — collapses distinctions and oversells humanlike capability.

That ambiguity has policy consequences. "If you don't have definitions nailed down in a policy document, then the policy can't be effective," Bender said.

Bender also flags the word "intelligence" itself, which she traces to historical roots in race science and eugenics. She and colleagues at the Distributed AI Research Institute point to deep connections between Silicon Valley and eugenicist thought. Ranking machines by whether they are smarter than humans, she argues, accepts the eugenic premise that human intelligence and worth can be measured on a single, linear scale.

Linguists note that words normally evolve from social practice and material conditions, not decree. A dictionary from the early 1900s defines "computer" as a human who performs arithmetic calculations; by the mid-20th century, labor and technology had shifted the meaning to electronic calculating machines. "Languages belong to their communities," Bender said.

How has Big Tech responded?

Some industry leaders aligned with the branding immediately. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called data centers "superintelligence factories." Elon Musk said he would rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI. More changes are likely.

The alliance is mutually beneficial. Industry heads gain political access, secure federal contracts and boost investor appetite by presenting AI as transformative — and best governed by voluntary self-regulation rather than binding rules. AI-related stocks and infrastructure investments depend on expectations that the technology will forever expand and improve; "super intelligence" makes pouring trillions into chips and server farms sound like a safe bet rather than a massive gamble.

The rebrand also redirects attention from resource-pillaging data centers, a fragile economic bubble and rising safety concerns.

The grandiose claims predate the order:

• Anthropic's Dario Amodei says AI will "cure most human disease in five to 10 years" — while some 28 million Americans lack health insurance.
• OpenAI's Sam Altman says AI is "going to be incredible for education" — while over half of US adults read below a sixth-grade level.
• President Trump says AI will make communities "successful and rich" — while consumer prices have increased around 29% since 2020.

Each promise comes with a gap between rhetoric and measurable conditions on the ground.

Is there precedent for politically driven renaming?

Yes, and it is mostly cosmetic. Baron points to a tradition in the United States. During World War I, anti-German propaganda turned hamburgers into "liberty sandwiches." In 2003, congressional cafeterias renamed french fries "freedom fries" to protest France's opposition to the Iraq war. Those names did not survive common usage.

Much like the Department of War renaming projected bellicosity, "super intelligence" projects an era of exceptional technological power and dominance. Whether it sticks depends on whether communities of speakers — scientists, journalists, the public — adopt it.

What should journalists do?

Editorial standards rest on established usage, not controlled Newspeak. Reporters and editors rely on references such as the AP Stylebook and their own publications' style guides for consistency, accuracy and clarity. The AP Stylebook first added a dedicated artificial intelligence chapter in 2023 and broadly expanded it earlier this year. AP's guidance is ethically grounded: it urges journalists to critically evaluate AI's technical limitations, move past corporate hype, and focus on how human-built AI tools operate, who profits from them and how they affect society.

Bender said that when there's a push for language change, linguists always ask what it's for — whether it serves propaganda or nationalism, or whether it genuinely helps people understand better or show respect, as with certain names and pronouns. "We're interested in how people talk, not telling them how they should talk," Bender said.

Journalists who adopt "super intelligence" as a blanket replacement for AI would capitulate to a political campaign. They would apply a term associated with broadly superhuman systems to technology that does not meet it, hiding limits and risks in the process.

The reality, on the current evidence: this technology is not superior to humans, whatever politicians or tech executives say. The job of the press is to describe that reality — and the meaning of the technology cannot be changed artificially.