‘Artificial’ sounds fake: Trump proposes renaming AI ‘super intelligence’ in UN speech

US President Donald Trump has announced that the US government will replace the term “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence” in its documents, saying the word “artificial” makes intelligence sound fake.

Trump made the announcement on Tuesday while addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York, days after asking the public to vote on alternative names for AI. He said the US would use “super intelligence” going forward and urged other countries to adopt the term.

“The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake and it is not fake. It’s actually amazing,” Trump said during his UN address.

The new name was not among the options in Trump’s original poll. On September 19, he had proposed Superior Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence and Supreme Intelligence as alternatives to artificial intelligence.

Trump’s renaming push comes as the US debates how quickly increasingly capable AI systems should be developed and whether additional safety measures are needed.

In his UN speech, Trump dismissed warnings about the technology and said the US should not restrict its development. He described AI as a major technological transformation and linked leadership in the technology to global power.

“Whoever wins AI, wins,” Trump said, according to reporting on his UN address.

Trump’s position follows a series of recent disputes over AI safety. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for measures to slow the development of frontier AI systems, arguing that rapidly advancing models could create serious risks. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed a federal framework for consistent safety requirements while arguing that companies can begin safety work without waiting for new legislation.

Trump has instead characterized concerns about AI taking over or destroying humanity as a “hoax.” He has also said the US should support the technology rather than slow its growth.

The phrase “super intelligence” already has a technical meaning in AI research. It generally refers to hypothetical AI systems whose capabilities exceed those of humans across a broad range of intellectual tasks.

That makes Trump’s proposed terminology different from simply shortening artificial intelligence to a new acronym. The term he selected is already associated with a possible future stage of AI development rather than the broad range of systems currently described as AI.

That future has also prompted warnings from researchers and executives working at some of the companies developing advanced AI systems. Jacob Coxon, who recently left Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI, warned that AI companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He said people developing the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger has similarly warned about the risks of future superintelligent systems. He wrote, “We really do earnestly believe A.I. could kill all humans!” and has argued that AI developers still lack a reliable way to ensure increasingly capable systems remain aligned with human interests.

Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI alignment researcher and current board member of OpenAI’s nonprofit foundation, has also warned of a “meaningful risk” that AI could cause a “catastrophic and irreversible loss of control.” He has said the industry is not currently on track to reduce that risk to an acceptable level.

Trump’s announcement also follows his creation of an “AI Force” and plans to appoint an AI “Czar.” He announced both measures on September 19 but did not initially provide detailed information about the structure or responsibilities of the proposed force.

With over a decade-long career in journalism, Neetika Walter has worked with The Economic Times, ANI, and Hindustan Times, covering politics, business, technology, and the clean energy sector. Passionate about contemporary culture, books, poetry, and storytelling, she brings depth and insight to her writing. When she isn’t chasing stories, she’s likely lost in a book or enjoying the company of her dogs.