Product Reports disagree 8 publishers 3 min read Published Sep 22, 2026, 8:46 PM PDT Updated Sep 23, 2026, 2:45 AM PDT

Trump's "super intelligence" rename takes over a term the field reserves for a hypothetical system

The president told the UN General Assembly that all US documents will drop "artificial". CNET reports that no order has followed, so anyone drafting federal-facing text is weighing a speech against a settled technical definition.

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What happened

Trump told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that all United States documents would be changed to use the term "super" instead of "artificial", introducing the label SI.
CNET reported that no official government order forcing the change from AI to SI had appeared, and that a White House representative referred the site to the president's UN comments.
IBM describes artificial superintelligence as a hypothetical system with intellectual abilities beyond those of humans, and Google similarly calls it a theoretical form of AI.
The wording came out of Truth Social polling, where "super" beat "superior" by a razor-thin margin in a second poll posted less than an hour after the first.
US Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein wrote on social media, "The Super Intelligence (SI) President has spoken! The United States is and will remain the global leader in SI."

Why it matters

Who has to decide decision Documentation owners have to decide whether to rewrite standing language on the strength of a speech, with no order number, effective date or list of bound agencies to enter in a change log.
What it limits constraint Once one label covers today's assistants, more autonomous agents and a system nobody has built, a federal risk section has to define its terms before it can say anything specific about any of them.
Who's exposed exposure Support and enablement teams absorb the distance between the label and the product, because users who hear "super intelligence" form expectations that hallucinations and failed multistep tasks then break.
What doesn't add up contradiction Adoption inside the administration and adoption in the industry are pulling in opposite directions, so a writer picking wording cannot lean on consensus in either camp.

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A compliance writer who takes the instruction literally hits the problem on the third page. The controls section has to separate systems in production from systems that exist only in theory, and the new label covers both.

Trump's stated reason is about connotation. "The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake," he said at the UN. "It is not fake. It's actually amazing." ^[3] TechRadar reported that he also admitted during the same address that he does not know whether he has the power to rename an entire science, technology discipline and industry ^[10].

The word he picked is already occupied. Researchers separate narrow AI, which covers image recognition and today's large language models, from artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical system matching human ability across a broad range of tasks, and from artificial superintelligence, a theoretical step past AGI whose abilities exceed humans in essentially every intellectual domain ^[12]. Nobody has demonstrated the third ^[5]. The definition traces to Nick Bostrom, who more than a decade ago described an "intellect" superior to humans in all forms, and it is still entirely hypothetical ^[8].

Ben Leong, a computer science lecturer at the National University of Singapore, told the BBC: "My guess is that professionals will want to save 'SI' for a higher level of AI, not so much to describe AI today. It doesn't feel like it's at that level yet." ^[17] Simon Coghlan, a digital ethics lecturer at the University of Melbourne, called the rebranding "misleading" because super intelligence typically refers to a system able to improve itself ^[15]. He said: "I doubt 'SI' will stick, in part because it exaggerates the current capacities of AI." ^[16]

Inside government, a rename normally arrives with paperwork. A January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in official documents ^[7]. Last month Trump ordered Lake Ontario designated Lake America ^[9]. Those give a records officer a date to act from. SI has so far travelled by repetition: Trump's ambassador to the UN, Michael Waltz, said, "If you didn't see the president's speech, it's now super intelligence. I think he's absolutely right." ^[19]

The term is also four days old as a choice. Trump was still saying AI on Saturday, when he proposed an AI Force as a follow-up to the Space Force ^[11]. On Monday he posted a poll offering "superior intelligence", "extreme intelligence" and "supreme intelligence", and "superior" led before it closed ^[22]. The label he announced at the UN won the second poll, not the first ^[24].

Two things settle this for a given document: whether a written instrument names the term, with an effective date and the agencies it binds, and whether the sentence has to distinguish systems shipping now from systems that remain hypothetical. There is no such instrument, and a controls sentence has to draw that line. So the cheapest option is to leave "artificial intelligence" in the text and add one defined-terms line noting that some US government communications use "super intelligence" or "SI". The cost of that hedge is a glossary entry; the cost of guessing wrong on a rewrite is every downstream document that quoted the old wording. If an order does land, the mandated label goes in headings and the narrow/general/super ladder stays in the glossary, so an evaluator can still tell which system a control covers.

Coghlan told the BBC that a superintelligent system, "if it came about, would be regarded by experts as the most consequential technology ever made" ^[21].

What to watch

Whether an executive order or agency memo names SI and gives an effective date, the way the January 2025 Gulf of America order did.
Whether the term starts appearing in the text of federal solicitations and agency reports. Contractors would first have to match it there.
Whether Trump keeps using AI himself in the way he did on Saturday when proposing an AI Force.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence82
Adoption12
Hype gap+55
Incentives68
Confidence74

Perspective Coverage

8 publishers

Builder: Builder 30%
Operator: Operator 44%
Investor: Investor 26%

Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

[1]
During an address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump announced that the U.S. government would begin referring to artificial intelligence as "Super Intelligence", or SI, arguing that the word "artificial" no longer accurately describes the technology.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[2]
"From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world's, will be changed to use the much more accurate term 'super' as opposed to artificial," Trump told delegates at the UN General Assembly.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[3]
"The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake," the president said at the UN. "It is not fake. It's actually amazing."
Reported SupportedView cited source
[4]
As of CNET's report, there did not appear to be an official government order forcing a change from AI to SI; a White House representative referred CNET to the president's UN comments.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[5]
Nobody has demonstrated artificial superintelligence yet.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[6]
IBM describes artificial superintelligence as a "hypothetical" AI system with intellectual abilities beyond those of humans, and Google similarly describes ASI as a theoretical form of AI that would surpass human intelligence.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[7]
A January 2025 executive order directed federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in official documents.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[8]
The term super intelligence is often linked to author and philosopher Nick Bostrom, who more than a decade ago defined the idea as an "intellect" that is superior to humans in all forms; it is still entirely hypothetical.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[9]
Last month Trump ordered Lake Ontario to be designated Lake America.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[10]
Trump rolled out the name change during his UN General Assembly address on Tuesday, admitting that he does not know if he has the power to rename an entire science, technology discipline, and industry, according to TechRadar.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[11]
The president was still using the term AI as of Saturday, when he proposed an AI Force as a follow-up to the Space Force, established in 2019.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[12]
AI researchers generally separate machine intelligence into artificial narrow intelligence (task-specific systems including image recognition, large language models and generative assistants), artificial general intelligence (a hypothetical AI matching human-level intellectual abilities across a broad range of tasks) and artificial superintelligence (a theoretical step beyond AGI, whose abilities exceed those of humans across essentially every intellectual domain).
Reported SupportedView cited source
[13]
Under the terminology Trump proposed, a government report describing the risks of "super intelligence" could refer to today's chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, to more autonomous AI agents acting on someone's behalf, or to a hypothetical future system more intelligent than any human, all sharing the same label.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[14]
Today's most advanced AI models can still hallucinate information, misunderstand instructions and confidently produce incorrect answers, and AI agents can make mistakes while using software and carrying out multistep tasks; calling those systems "super intelligence" could give users a very different impression of what they are capable of.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[15]
The rebranding is "misleading", as super intelligence typically refers to a system that has the ability to improve by itself, said digital ethics lecturer Simon Coghlan of The University of Melbourne.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[16]
"I doubt 'SI' will stick, in part because it exaggerates the current capacities of AI," Coghlan said.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[17]
National University of Singapore computer science lecturer Ben Leong said: "My guess is that professionals will want to save 'SI' for a higher level of AI, not so much to describe AI today. It doesn't feel like it's at that level yet."
Reported SupportedView cited source
[18]
"The Super Intelligence (SI) President has spoken! The United States is and will remain the global leader in SI," US Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein wrote on social media.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[19]
Trump's ambassador to the UN, Michael Waltz, later said: "If you didn't see the president's speech, it's now super intelligence. I think he's absolutely right."
Reported SupportedView cited source
[20]
Experts told the BBC that the term is unlikely to gain widespread traction in the industry because it is a name typically used to refer to more advanced systems.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[21]
"A superintelligent system, if it came about, would be regarded by experts as the most consequential technology ever made," Coghlan said.
Reported SupportedView cited source
[22]
On Monday, Trump posted a poll to Truth Social and X asking people to vote for a new term to replace AI: "superior intelligence", "extreme intelligence" or "supreme intelligence". "Superior intelligence" took the lead before the poll closed.
Reported ContestedView cited source
[23]
Another poll, posted less than an hour later, asked people to decide between "super intelligence" and "superior intelligence"; "super" won by a razor-thin margin.
Reported ContestedView cited source
[24]
The label Trump announced at the UN, "super intelligence", was the winner of the second Truth Social poll and not the leader of the first, which was "superior intelligence".
Derived Contested

Sources

8 independent publishers whose own reporting we read for this story.

bbc.co.uk
1 article · September 22, 2026
Will Trump's AI rebrand to 'super intelligence' catch on?
cnet.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
Trump Says AI Is Now Super Intelligence. What's Really Super Is the Internet Response - CNET
gizmodo.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
Trump Says He’s Changing Artificial Intelligence to ‘Super Intelligence’ on Government Documents
interestingengineering.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
‘Artificial’ sounds fake: Trump proposes renaming AI ‘super intelligence’ in UN speech
techradar.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
Trump wants to rename Artificial Intelligence ‘Super Intelligence’ — but his real message is that he doesn't want to regulate it, and that's what worries me | TechRadar
thenextweb.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
Trump tells the UN that AI is now ‘super intelligence’
theverge.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
Trump says US is officially renaming AI ‘super intelligence’
tomsguide.com
1 article · September 22, 2026
Trump wants to call AI ‘Super Intelligence’ because ‘artificial’ sounds fake — but that’s not even what superintelligence means | Tom's Guide

Clarity analysis

How the coverage leans and what the record actually supports. Read the methodology

Perspective Coverage

How much of the coverage speaks to builders, operators and investors. It measures emphasis, not whether the story is right.

Builder30%

The useful reporting for anyone who works with these systems is definitional. Tom's Guide walks the standard split into narrow AI, general intelligence and superintelligence, and cites IBM calling artificial superintelligence "hypothetical" and Google calling it theoretical. The BBC traces the word to Nick Bostrom and quotes Ben Leong of the National University of Singapore: "My guess is that professionals will want to save 'SI' for a higher level of AI, not so much to describe AI today." TNW adds the part that complicates the objection, which is that the labs chose the word first: Meta and OpenAI already use superintelligence to describe where they say the technology is heading. What a model actually does hasn't changed in any of these accounts. Tom's Guide says plainly that industry terminology was unchanged at publication.

Operator44%

For anyone who drafts or reviews federal-facing text, the practical question is whether a word is now required, and CNET is the only outlet here that asked. A White House representative referred it to the president's UN comments, and no order had appeared. On stage Trump said "Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't," in The Verge's transcript. Two officials moved anyway: the US CTO Ethan Klein and UN ambassador Michael Waltz both used SI within hours, per the BBC. The substantive risk is the one Tom's Guide works through. A document headed "risks of super intelligence" could describe ChatGPT, an agent clicking through software, or a system nobody has built, and the reader cannot tell which. TNW notes Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar have a bill to ban artificial superintelligence, so the collision now runs through pending legislation as well as agency prose.

Investor26%

The money content of the speech sits beside the branding, and three outlets pull it out. TechRadar's Lance Ulanoff argues the rename is misdirection and the real message is the line "We will only encourage super intelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rein it in." TNW adds the rejection of any global control mechanism and the administration's year spent trying to stop states writing their own rules. The BBC ends on Trump meeting Xi Jinping this week with AI on the agenda. Gizmodo is the only one to connect the rename to market exposure, arguing the president's tolerance for AI rests on an equity market propped up by AI investment. None of the eight pieces reports a price or a disclosed deal, so the investor read is entirely about regulatory posture.

Reality

Evidence, adoption, hype gap, incentives and confidence, each read independently from the current record on the scale shown beneath it. How these are measured.

Evidence82: 0100
Strong on the speech, soft on the wording
The central fact is a public address, and the quoted passage holds across The Verge's long transcript, the BBC's version and Tom's Guide's. The technical half is anchored to named authorities: IBM and Google on superintelligence being hypothetical, Bostrom's definition, two university lecturers speaking on the record. The score is held down by a transcript problem and a polling problem. TNW said it could not find an official White House transcript and that outlets' transcriptions differ, and the poll history in CNET and Gizmodo does not reconcile on rounds, options or margin.
Adoption12: 0100
Two officials on board, the order still missing
Ethan Klein and Michael Waltz used SI on the record within hours, and that is the whole of the uptake in this reporting. CNET found no order. Tom's Guide says the industry's vocabulary was unchanged at publication. Canada's AI minister Evan Solomon answered the question by saying Canadians are not enthusiastic about renaming things. Gizmodo's track record on the earlier renames cuts both ways: Apple and Google changed their maps, and nobody says Lake America.
Hype gap+55: −100 understated0 aligned+100 overstated
"Officially" is not backed by anything
Two overstatements ride on this story. The first is procedural: headlines say the US is officially renaming AI, and the record contains a speech, a Truth Social post and no directive, with Trump himself unsure whether he has the power. The second is technical, and most of the press caught it early. The word he chose names a system that does not exist, applied to tools that Tom's Guide notes still hallucinate and misread instructions. Coghlan's judgement to the BBC is the tightest statement of the gap: the rebranding "exaggerates the current capacities of AI".
Incentives68: 0100
Everyone quoted has a stake in the word
The two officials endorsing SI work for the man who chose it, and Klein's post calls Trump "The Super Intelligence (SI) President". The word itself is borrowed from marketing: TNW points out Zuckerberg built an essay around personal superintelligence and that Meta and OpenAI both use the term for their destination. The critics carry positions too. TechRadar's piece is signed opinion that argues the rename is deliberate misdirection, and Gizmodo routes through gas prices and Matt Walsh's contempt before reaching the terminology. Tom's Guide and the BBC are the two accounts where the framing follows the sourcing.
Confidence74: 0100
Confident on what was said, less on what follows
What Trump said is settled by eight independent accounts of a televised speech, and the technical objection is carried by named institutions and named lecturers. What remains open is everything downstream: whether a directive appears, how agencies handle the collision in documents, and whether the two officials using SI turn out to be the leading edge or the whole of it. The poll discrepancy between CNET and Gizmodo is small in itself and a reminder that the pre-speech chronology was reconstructed from social media posts.

Topics and entities

Topics

US technology policy
Superintelligence
AI Regulation