The US president says federal documents should adopt the term as he rejects international AI controls, though no detailed rollout plan has been confirmed.
US President Donald Trump has announced that American government documents will replace the term artificial intelligence with super intelligence, proposing a change in terminology while opposing international regulation of the technology.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 22, Trump said the new wording would better describe the capabilities of rapidly developing AI systems. He also expressed hope that other countries would follow the United States in adopting it.
However, there was no confirmed executive order or detailed implementation plan immediately explaining when federal agencies would have to make the change across their records, policies and public communications.
Why Trump wants a new name
Trump argued that describing the technology as artificial made it sound fake or understated its importance. He said super intelligence was a more suitable label and proposed SI as its abbreviation.
The announcement followed public polls he conducted on X and Truth Social. Super intelligence emerged ahead of alternatives that included superior intelligence, extreme intelligence and supreme intelligence.
The proposed switch concerns the language used to describe the technology. It does not, by itself, introduce a new category of working systems, change the capabilities of existing products or automatically revise the rules governing AI companies.
Opposition to international oversight
Trump also used his address to reject proposals for global supervision of AI, arguing that international controls could hold back American technological development.
He framed rapid growth in the sector as important to maintaining the country’s lead over competitors, particularly China. Rather than support new international regulatory institutions, he said his administration would use the Justice Department to monitor the industry and act where necessary.
His position comes amid continuing debate among governments, researchers and technology companies over how to manage AI’s expanding role. Calls for stronger safeguards have focused on misinformation, employment disruption, privacy and cybercrime, as well as the potential difficulty of controlling highly advanced systems.
The naming announcement and his regulatory stance address separate questions: what the government calls the technology, and how its development and use should be supervised.
A term with an existing scientific meaning
The proposed wording could create confusion because superintelligence already carries a specific meaning in AI research. It describes a theoretical system whose abilities would substantially exceed those of humans across almost all intellectual tasks, including scientific work, communication and problem-solving.
Today’s widely used chatbots, image-generation tools and workplace applications generally do not meet that definition. Although they can perform particular tasks effectively, they are not considered more capable than humans across the full range of thinking and reasoning.
Technology experts therefore regard the proposed change as political and administrative rather than scientific. Applying a different label to current tools would not make them superintelligent in the research sense.
Whether the terminology gains acceptance beyond US government messaging remains uncertain. Researchers and technology companies are likely to retain AI as the standard term, while the absence of a confirmed implementation timetable leaves the practical scope of the proposed federal change unclear.
