What happened
Trump announced at the UN that the US government is officially renaming "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" on government documents, calling it a vector of American power that must not be restrained by "globalist schemes."
Why it matters
The rebrand appears to be a narrative move to frame AI as a symbol of American dominance, but it may struggle to resonate as the public remains uncertain about more alarming AI narratives coming from the labs themselves.
What to watch
Whether the language shift translates into actual policy remains unclear, and the article notes the AI-as-nationalist-dominator framing is already dying on the vine among Trump's own base.
WHO IT HITSThis lands on policy analysts and government affairs teams tracking how AI is framed in federal documents, and on voters weighing the administration's AI messaging against rising electricity bills and job insecurity.
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
The rebranding of "artificial intelligence" to "super intelligence" lands amid a broader contest over how AI is described in public life. The article traces this back to John McCarthy's 1973 admission that he invented the term "artificial intelligence" to secure funding for a summer study in 1956 — a reminder that the label has always been a narrative device. Trump's version differs from the Silicon Valley sense of "artificial super-intelligence," the article notes; it sloughs off the "artificial" entirely and reads as "super" in the Superman sense.
The piece places this alongside a competing narrative pushed by AI lab leaders: that their systems may soon exterminate humanity. The author argues that this extinction story serves the companies' interests by giving them a way to coordinate a slowdown without antitrust exposure, and by letting them shape their own regulation. That skepticism is echoed by Hugging Face head Clement Delangue, who told the Security Council that the bigger threat is "asymmetry" — between attackers and defenders, between a few companies and everyone else.
What the two stories share, the article concludes, is that both keep power tilted toward those telling them. Whether the rebrand changes anything in practice may hinge on whether it moves past rhetoric, and on how voters weigh the framing against the electricity bills and job worries the article cites.
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