Trump Says US Is 'Officially' Renaming AI to 'Super Intelligence'

Speaking Tuesday morning at the UN General Assembly, Donald Trump claimed the US is now "officially" renaming artificial intelligence to "super intelligence" — an announcement he slipped into a speech otherwise aimed at Iran, "globalists," climate change, and transgender people.

The claim arrived without any accompanying executive action, agency statement, or regulatory filing. Notably, "super intelligence" was not among the options in the poll Trump posted days earlier, when he first began floating a rebrand of the term.

Trump offered a rationale for the change. According to the president, the word "artificial" makes the intelligence sound fake.

The renaming claim fits a pattern. Trump has previously moved to rename the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Superior, the Kennedy Center, and Denali. Some of those attempts stuck in federal usage — Google Maps, for instance, adopted "Gulf of America" — while others met resistance; MapQuest saw a surge in downloads after refusing to rename Lake Ontario.

The stakes here are more than semantic. "Artificial intelligence" is the term embedded in US statute, federal procurement rules, international standards bodies, and the research literature. A presidential preference for "super intelligence" carries no legal force on its own, but it can shift administrative language, as previous renaming efforts demonstrated.

There is also a technical mismatch. In AI research, "superintelligence" refers to a hypothetical system that exceeds human capabilities across all domains — a threshold no current model has reached. Applying the label to today's AI would conflate shipping products with a speculative concept researchers themselves treat as unproven.

Whether any agency, standard-setter, or vendor follows the president's usage will determine if this declaration has practical effect or joins the growing list of symbolic renamings.