Trump Issues Executive Order to Rename Artificial Intelligence
- Trump issued an executive order mandating that the United States government officially rename artificial intelligence to Super Intelligence.
- The federal rebranding initiative stems from a speech delivered at the United Nations on September 23, where the president first hinted at abandoning the established industry terminology.
- Despite controlling trillions of dollars and leading America’s most important industry, none of the executives voiced an objection to the sweeping linguistic change during the lunch meeting.
President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order mandating that the United States government officially rename artificial intelligence to Super Intelligence. The decree, finalized following a White House lunch with top AI leaders, effectively bans the use of the 70-year-old term within federal directives and signals an expectation for the private sector to adopt the new nomenclature.
White House Mandates Super Intelligence Term for AI
The federal rebranding initiative stems from a speech delivered at the United Nations on September 23, where the president first hinted at abandoning the established industry terminology. Following those remarks, the White House hosted a luncheon convening several top AI leaders. The guest list included Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk. During the gathering, the administration formally advanced the executive order, establishing Super Intelligence as the required term across official contexts.
AI Executives Accept Linguistic Change to Avoid Retaliation
Despite controlling trillions of dollars and leading America’s most important industry, none of the executives voiced an objection to the sweeping linguistic change during the lunch meeting. Jacob Weisberg, author of Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, described the episode as a classic loyalty test designed to assess whether powerful figures would compromise to curry favor and avoid presidential retaliation.
The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively, Weisberg said. If all of those guys had just said, We’ll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don’t accept [the name change], what would he have done?