President Donald Trump on Thursday opened up a new front in his ongoing war against commonly used terms and geographic names by warning that anyone referring to Large Language Models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude as “Artificial Intelligence” would earn themselves a place on his enemies list.
Writing on Truth Social, he declared that the White House “considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”
The president’s outburst-cum-veiled threat landed just over a week after he signed an executive order directing executive branch agencies to begin referring to artificial intelligence, which is now embedded across the federal government, as “super intelligence” following a lunch with leaders in the AI industry, including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei and others.
That widely mocked directivefollowed bizarre remarks to the U.N. General Assembly in which he declared that the U.S. “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme” for regulating AI and declaring that the technology would be “hereinafter officially called super intelligence” because “use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake.”
“It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” said Trump, who the week before had launched a poll in his Truth Social feed over the weekend asking respondents to vote for either “Super Intelligence,” “Superior Intelligence,” or “Extreme Intelligence.”
The president’s latest linguistic ultimatum is the most recent example of his ongoing effort to change the minds of voters — including many of his own supporters — who’ve increasingly soured on the industry that has tied itself tightly to his unpopular administration.
In recent months, that souring has shown up in nearly every poll that asks about AI. A Quinnipiac University survey of 1,032 registered voters taken late last month found 73 percent oppose “the building of an AI data center in your community,” including 55 percent of Republicans, and 79 percent said safety matters more than keeping the United States at the forefront of AI development.
Just 25 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the technology against 58 percent who disapprove, and 71 percent said they’d be more likely to back a candidate who supports “stricter guardrails” on it — a figure that includes a majority of Republicans, at 52 percent, and nearly three-quarters of independents.
A separate Fox News poll of 1,211 registered voters conducted earlier in September put overall opinion of AI at 37 percent favorable to 60 percent unfavorable, a net rating of minus 23 that has worsened from minus 11 in April and minus 9 in July. The same survey found voters trust Democrats over Republicans to handle data centers by 14 points, and that among those who oppose the facilities anywhere, Democrats lead the generic ballot by at least 19 points.
Trump’s demand for widespread adoption of “super intelligence” in lieu of AI comes just over a month after his last attempt at linguistic coercion, an executive order directing the executive branch to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
The order to rename one of the five Great Lakesalong the U.S.-Canada border came in a fit of rage over his ongoing trade war with Ottawa and echoed a similar move from early in his second term when he attempted to unilaterally rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
While the president does have the authority to direct how the government recognizes the names of places and landmarks, he cannot force Canada or individual citizens on either side of the border to follow his preferred naming conventions.
The same goes for use of the term “super intelligence.” He can direct the government to use it but he cannot force Americans — or anyone else — to use his preferred terminology.
The Independent has reached out to NVIDIA, Palantir, Meta, OpenAI, Google, Tesla and Anthropic regarding whether the companies have any plans to use the president’s new terminology in promotional materials or other customer communications; none responded.
But the White House has touted a short list of tech CEOs who’d used the phrase, including Elon Musk and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang.
Complicating the matter, the word superintelligence already means an AI system that surpasses human intellect and ability across multiple domains in couding reasoning, social skills and scientific research — a step toward the kind of rogue AI that many fear, sparking the calls for guardrails and kill switches.
