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Donald Trump wants the tech world to rebrand AI from what he calls a “terrible” name that pits Americans against data centers and AI development to “super intelligence, or SI.”
A new report suggests that probably won’t happen anytime soon.
Tech insiders and industry lobbyists told Politico, some privately, that the attempt to rebrand artificial intelligence likely would not have an effect. Some companies may use the term in their dealings with the government, the insiders said, but the majority will continue to use a decades-old and relevant phrase that Trump asked journalists and all government employees to refrain from using this week as he stood at the White House alongside top industry executives like Jensen Huang, Sundar Pichai, Dario Amodei and Mark Zuckerberg.
“It’s not AI, it’s IS,” Trump told a reporter who asked him about rogue artificial intelligence agents, as he met with the press outside the White House alongside CEOs. He ignored the question about rogue agents.
He explained his hatred for the term last week: “Using the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence seem fake. It’s not fake. It’s actually incredible.”
Over the past week, Trump has rolled out his attempted rebranding, which he told reporters last week after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House and claimed his counterpart and global rival supported the idea.
On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to refer to AI as “SI” and “superintelligence” in official documents and communications. The order has no legal effect on the private sector.
Some industry experts, however, worry that this will simply confuse Americans, rather than achieve the president’s desired effect of ignoring concerns about the capabilities of rampant artificial intelligence.
“It’s a way for CEOs to signal their loyalty to the president,” Adam Kovacevich, CEO of the progressive tech industry coalition Chamber of Progress, told Politico.
“No one in the industry is about to start calling it superintelligence. It’s like Gulf America and Lake America. It’s something only MAGA supplicants use.”
Adam Thierer, a technology researcher at the R Street Institute, said Policy.: “I think this adds some confusion to the ongoing policy debate, because the term superintelligence means different things to different people, but it already had a general meaning in the literature and debates about advanced AI.”
The word superintelligence already denotes an AI system that surpasses human intellect and capabilities in multiple areas in terms of reasoning, social skills and scientific research – a step toward the type of malicious AI that many fear, triggering calls for guardrails and kill switches.
One tech lobbyist laid out the industry’s likely response to Trump’s nomenclature order: “The government can change its vocabulary overnight and the private sector follows where it works with the government, but broader use takes longer.” » This lobbyist described this change as improbable, according to the media.
For their part, the companies whose representatives participated in Tuesday’s meeting at the White House remain silent. The Independent contacted NVIDIA, Palantir, Meta, OpenAI, Google, Tesla and Anthropic to see if the companies planned to use the president’s new terminology in promotional materials or other customer communications; none responded.
The White House gave The Independent a short list of tech CEOs who have used the phrase since Tuesday’s event, including two articles on X from Elon Musk and one from NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, which directly referenced the president’s executive order. Huang has not tweeted since that September 30 post. David Sacks, a Trump political ally who previously served as the president’s AI and crypto czar, was also on the list alongside Sanjay Mehotra of Microntech, who also tweeted about the White House order.
Concerns about the capabilities and use of AI have combined with local frustrations over the construction of data centers in the run-up to the midterm elections, amid a wave of warnings from researchers in the field about the technology’s possible outcomes.
Two Anthropic researchers (one of whom also worked at OpenAI) warned last month in posts that made headlines on social media that artificial intelligence had the capacity to cause human extinction, sparking a wave of calls for action on Capitol Hill. These warnings were accompanied by an incident in which malicious AI agents created by OpenAI managed to breach the digital infrastructure of IT systems company Hugging Face after escaping an isolated testing environment. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, made the case in a blog post for AI companies to commit to slowing down development and bringing in third-party experts to monitor test cases.
This legislative action is only beginning to take shape, and the House and Senate have gone on their final recess until the midterm elections without passing legislation to address calls for guardrails on AI development. Trump, in his remarks to the press during his Tuesday meeting with AI industry leaders, also expressed his own opposition to attempts at federal regulation in the area, arguing instead that companies should regulate themselves.
Some Democrats and Republicans are joining efforts to regulate the industry despite Trump’s opposition. On Thursday, two bipartisan senators announced new legislation aimed at holding AI companies accountable for the actions of malicious AI agents. But the bill won’t be voted on until after lawmakers return in November.
“These AI agents are committing cyberattacks. If big tech companies want to design AI agents that wreak havoc, those companies better be responsible for any harm caused,” Sen. Josh Hawley, the bill’s Republican sponsor, said in a press release.
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