On Tuesday, President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that the US government will officially stop using the term "artificial intelligence." Going forward, federal documents will call it "super intelligence," or SI, because, in his words, "artificial" makes the technology sound fake when it's actually amazing.

The new name did not come from a federal agency, a standards body, or anyone who works on the technology. It came from an online poll Trump ran over the weekend on X and Truth Social. The options he offered voters were "superior intelligence," "extreme intelligence," and "supreme intelligence." Super intelligence, the name he actually announced, wasn't one of the choices.

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Poll options offered to the public over the weekend
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Of those options that matched the name Trump actually announced
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Later, OpenAI's and Anthropic's CEOs addressed the UN Security Council specifically on AI safety

The Speech Itself

Trump delivered the announcement inside the same passage of his UN address where he said the US rejects any international effort to control AI development. He framed the rename as more accurate than the existing term, told the assembly the change would apply to United States documents and, he hoped, the world's, and at one point openly questioned whether he actually has the authority to order it, telling the room he'd find out soon enough. He closed the section by dismissing AI safety concerns generally as a hoax, a word he's used consistently since Dario Amodei's pacing essay set off weeks of industry debate earlier this month.

The ReactionResponse online was immediate and largely unkind, with the moment widely described as beyond parody within hours. The renaming effort also lands alongside separate reporting that the president's family has continued expanding investments across the AI economy even as he publicly downplays the case for any safety-driven slowdown.

The Juxtaposition That Actually Matters

The more substantive story sits right next to this one on the calendar. The day after Trump's speech, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei were scheduled to address the UN Security Council directly on AI safety and regulation, joined by Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue, the same week China's president was set to arrive in Washington. Whatever the federal government decides to call the technology, the actual policy debate, whether the industry's own pacing proposals amount to anything, and whether governments coordinate on safety standards, is happening in the room next door, largely unaffected by what the technology is named.

A name change costs nothing and commits to nothing. Whether that's a harmless bit of theater or a preview of how seriously this administration intends to engage with the substance of AI safety policy probably depends on what comes out of the Security Council session it happened to precede by one day.

Sources: AI Pulse · Spilling the Tea · workplaceai.ai. Trump's UN General Assembly remarks, September 22, 2026: PBS NewsHour, The Washington Times, and Yahoo News. The poll options: The Washington Times. Public reaction: Yahoo News. The UN Security Council session and family investment context: CNBC Daily Open, September 23, 2026. Every quote and detail above is attributed to its original reporting; none is a WorkplaceAI study.