President Donald Trump wants to make “superintelligence” the new buzzword in Washington’s AI debate. Many of Big Tech’s bold-faced names celebrated the move in his presence.
Silicon Valley and its lobbyists in Washington aren’t buying it.
“It is a way for the CEOs to signal fealty to the president,” Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the progressive tech industry coalition Chamber of Progress, told POLITICO. “No one in the industry is about to start calling it superintelligence. It’s like Gulf of America and Lake America. It’s something that only MAGA supplicants use.”
Kovacevich, tech industry lobbyists and close observers dismissed Trump’s full rebrand of artificial intelligence, which followed weeks of the president trying to promote “superintelligence” in Truth Social posts. Late on Tuesday, he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to use the term.
“Superintelligence” is a contested term that has been used both by AI advocates to describe systems that surpass human abilities and bring major benefits and AI safety advocates to warn that such systems could outpace human control.
Adam Thierer, a senior researcher on technology and innovation at the libertarian R Street Institute, said changing the terminology would be easier than conducting a comprehensive new study of AI, but cautioned it could muddy the policy debate.
“I think it adds some confusion to the ongoing policy discussion because the term superintelligence means different things to different people, but it already had a general meaning in the literature and debates about advanced AI,” Thierer said.
When asked for comment, the White House Press Office pointed POLITICO to comments the president made during an announcement Wednesday in the Oval Office: “We don’t call it artificial intelligence because it’s not artificial, it’s real. It’s a terrible word. It’s amazing it lived on so long actually.”
One tech lobbyist on K Street, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the order, said some companies may adopt the term in work involving the federal government, but that a broader industry-wide shift was unlikely.
“The government can change its vocabulary overnight and the private sector follows where it’s working with the government, but broader usage takes longer,” the lobbyist said.
Tuesday’s executive order asserted that as the capabilities of the technology grow, they increasingly represent “a new era of Super Intelligence,” and that terminology used by the federal government to describe it “should reflect the transformative capabilities of these technologies and the limitless opportunities they create for the American people.”
Tech leaders and administration officials who earlier on Tuesday attended a lunch with Trump at the White House were quick to adopt the term. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, speaking Tuesday at a White House event launching the AI-powered America.gov, said data centers should now be referred to as “superintelligence factories.”
“They all agreed that that would be a great word,” Trump said Wednesday of the tech executives and the decision to change the name to superintelligence.
The executive order was also accompanied by a “morally binding” set of AI accords signed by Trump and the tech executives at the lunch, which encouraged companies to “implement robust internal controls” to monitor the capabilities of AI models during training.
“Artificial intelligence is facing a crisis of public trust, not because of its name, but because AI agents have hacked private companies, accessed government systems, compromised sensitive data, and caused real harms,” Chris MacKenzie, vice president of communications at nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation, said in a statement. “A name change doesn’t fix that.”
John Hewitt Jones contributed to this report.
