Trump says US is "officially" renaming AI to "super intelligence"

Trump's remarks came during a Tuesday morning address at the UN General Assembly, where he covered Iran, "globalists," climate change, and transgender people before turning to AI. His claim that the US is "officially" renaming the technology is unusual even by the standards of his earlier renamings: he has previously decreed new names for the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Superior, the Kennedy Center, and Denali, and digital maps switched labels for US users — but the article notes this wasn't among the options in the poll he posted days earlier when he began on the tangent.

The speech itself was a mix of assertion and uncertainty. Trump said the term "artificial" makes intelligence sound fake, that the US leads China "by a lot," and that he won't "stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution." He also said the Department of Justice would "watch it closely" and "rein things in if we have to," while at the same time saying he would "encourage it, not rein it in." Then he conceded, "Let's see if I have any power. Maybe I do, and maybe I don't, we're gonna find out pretty soon."

The practical effect looks uncertain. Whether federal agencies, contractors, or map and platform providers adopt "super intelligence" — or whether the change remains a rhetorical flourish — appears to hinge on whether Trump's administration translates the claim into formal directives. For now, the clearest takeaway is that the US president used a global stage to rebrand a technology his own government is still regulating, and acknowledged he isn't certain he can make it stick.