Trump signs executive order renaming AI to ‘super intelligence’

• US President Donald Trump signed an executive order to replace the term “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) with “Super Intelligence” (SI) in the executive branch.

• The move is to recognise the continuously advancing technological frontier and the limitless promise it offers.

Why Trump signed such an order?

• The order directs all departments and agencies to use Super Intelligence (SI) in official correspondence, public communications, policy documents, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch and to no longer acknowledge the term “Artificial Intelligence (AI)”.

• The capabilities of today’s frontier systems do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence.

• They increasingly amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity, empowering people to achieve what was previously impossible across science, medicine, and nearly every other domain of human endeavour.  

• As these capabilities continue to improve, they increasingly represent not merely artificial intelligence, but a new era of “Super Intelligence”.

• The name Super Intelligence conveys the true capabilities of the technologies being developed today, unlocking new forms of human creativity and empowering people to achieve what was previously impossible, not simply imitating or automating human intelligence as is implied by the term “artificial intelligence”.

• Using the term Super Intelligence will ensure departments and agencies remain focused on expanding the capabilities and applications of these technologies to empower people, strengthen the economy, and improve the lives of the people.

• The US government has announced more than $5 billion for the Genesis Mission, a national effort to harness Super Intelligence to accelerate breakthroughs in science, medicine, energy, and manufacturing.

• On September 22, in his address at the UN General Assembly, Trump said the US government would use the term “Super Intelligence” instead of AI and repeated his view that AI safety warnings are a hoax.

AI accord with tech executives

• Trump released a document that his administration cast as an accord on AI and which he said earlier was signed by him and tech executives that he met in Washington.

• Executives at the meeting included OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

• The accord asked companies to partner with an external auditor or evaluator to carry out independent assessments of whether a company’s AI control and monitoring systems were operating as intended.

• It urged companies to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from internal and external auditors and from teams operating AI controls.

• It asked for internal controls to monitor capabilities and alignment of AI models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity and chemical threats to ensure that models “do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways”.