Trump Renames AI 'Super Intelligence' in UN Speech, Rejects Global Regulation

The United States government has formally replaced the term "artificial intelligence" with "super intelligence" across all federal documents, a rebranding ordered by President Donald Trump during his September 22, 2026, address to the United Nations General Assembly. The directive, which the president stated takes effect immediately, pairs a cosmetic change with a substantive policy shift: the U.S. will not participate in international frameworks designed to regulate the rapidly advancing technology.[1][2][3]

Speaking to world leaders in New York, the president dismissed global oversight efforts as a "globalist scheme" and argued that the word "artificial" undermines the technology's actual capabilities. "The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake," Trump told the 81st General Assembly. "It is not fake. It's actually amazing. But we have to be careful." He added that from this point forward, U.S. documents would use the abbreviation "SI."[2][5]

The origin of the new nomenclature appears to be informal. Over the weekend preceding the speech, the White House polled users on 2 social media platforms, X and Truth Social, asking them to choose between alternative names for the technology. "Super intelligence" secured roughly 30 percent of the vote in the unscientific poll and was subsequently written into the president's official remarks.[4]

The policy arrives amid escalating anxiety among both international governments and the technology industry's own leadership regarding the trajectory of machine learning. Ahead of the gathering, leaders from more than 20 predominantly European nations endorsed binding safety measures for advanced systems, warning that development could soon outpace human control.[2]

Trump explicitly rejected those concerns, comparing contemporary warnings from AI safety advocates to past predictions about climate change. "The very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming... are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster," he said.[2][5]

The administration's stance isolates the U.S. from emerging consensus among allied nations and even domestic developers. French President Emmanuel Macron used his own U.N. address to call for pooled investment in open-source models to prevent dependency on a single great power. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—who published a September 12 essay urging a slower pace of development—were scheduled to brief the 15-member U.N. Security Council on Wednesday regarding the necessity of global guardrails.[2][5]

Fact-checkers and industry researchers quickly noted that "superintelligence" already possesses a specific, established definition within computer science. A recent paper from Google's AI lab, DeepMind, defines artificial superintelligence as a system with superhuman abilities across virtually all tasks—a threshold that current models, which still exhibit jagged performance across different contexts, have not yet reached.[5]

The diplomatic fallout was immediate, though largely symbolic. Delegations from Cuba and Iran walked out during the president's broader remarks, which also touched on the administration's robust use of military force. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian was traveling to address the assembly on September 23, marking an unusual visit by a leader of a country actively engaged in conflict with the U.S.[4][5]

Moving forward, federal agencies face the logistical task of updating terminology across active policies, procurement contracts, and regulatory frameworks. The international community, meanwhile, must determine how to construct safety protocols for a technology whose leading nation has explicitly opted out of the regulatory process.[1][2]