Trump’s attempt to rename AI is looking awfully artificial

A ‘super’ new euphemism probably isn’t enough to make Americans forget their concerns about AI.

A ‘super’ new euphemism probably isn’t enough to make Americans forget their concerns about AI.

President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like “Little Marco” and “Crooked Hillary”; he changed “fake news” from a phrase describing scammy media outlets to a derogatory term for the press at large. Over the past few weeks, he’s clearly decided he can work the same magic to promote artificial intelligence — branding a technology he wants to accelerate “super”, while turning “artificial” into his latest go-to pejorative and declaring resisters “THE ENEMY.” Some of the biggest names in AI are going along with him. But he’s picked a tough linguistic battle, and it may not pan out the way he hopes.

A longtime AI booster, Trump has gone into pro-robot overdrive since an industry conversation over “pacing” frontier development last month. His current position is that AI safety risks are overblown and US companies need to speed up development, including by building more data centers, which he insists contrary to polling data will be “very popular.” On top of discouraging industry self-regulation, he’s decided AI needs a rebrand by fiat. Trump declared in a rambling United Nations speech last month that “the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake” and promised to rename the technology “super intelligence.” He then followed through with an executive order last week, forbidding the use of “AI” wherever possible.

Changes have been swift. The US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), already a rebrand of the AI Safety Institute, has been renamed the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI). Justice Department press releases have been modified to include the phrase, trumpeting that a man who flooded streaming platforms with AI-generated songs between 2017 and 2024 committed “Super Intelligence-Assisted Music Streaming Fraud.” On Thursday, Trump declared that “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”

The same tech company figures who rushed to donate millions to Trump after his election have quickly signed on. Trump’s “First Buddy” Elon Musk has promised to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, while Jeff Bezos declared he likes it because “artificial is not a very flattering thing.” Jensen Huang, whom Trump called live on stage last month to rant that “robots will not be taking over,” has likewise adopted the term.