Trump wants to rename AI but Superintelligence is already taken
The announcement — Donald Trump, UN General Assembly, 22 September 2026Reuters · from 1:17 · click to load
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The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now here and after officially called superintelligence, changing the name, and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake.
And it is not fake. It’s actually amazing. But we have to be careful. In fact, it is exactly the opposite of what it purports. From this point forward, all of United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.
So it’s super intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of superintelligence dash SISI. Let’s see if that goes. It sounds much better. It is much better, and it’s much more accurate. Let’s see if I have any power. Maybe I do and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon.
Superintelligence. Every major new technology brings challenges, and superintelligence is no exception. Yet the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead. These are the same people that 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.
… This is the group that came up with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, the Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine hoax, climate change, open borders, whoever wins AI, you have to remember this. And now I say, whoever wins s I, whoever wins, superintelligence wins. That’s the group that wins.
And we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. And we’re going to keep it that way. … I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution, many say bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the internet itself.
On 22 September 2026, Donald Trump told the UN General Assembly that artificial intelligence should become “super intelligence”. The choice followed a public poll, but entered a vocabulary with decades of research behind it. What does the new name actually promise?
The term has a research history stretching back decades. The philosopher Nick Bostrom discussed superintelligence in a paper published in 1998, building on I. J. Good’s 1965 “ultraintelligent machine”, and defined it in his 2014 book as an intellect that greatly exceeds human cognitive performance in virtually all domains of interest. It has named the top of the field’s vocabulary ever since.
The spelling is not incidental. The established term is one word — superintelligence, as in Bostrom’s title and in artificial superintelligence (ASI). The White House and most US reporting write super intelligence, as two. The UN’s own report renders it as one word — though that may be a writer normalising to the familiar term rather than a considered choice. Either way, the two-word form is the new arrival, and the one-word form is what it collides with.
The difference between AI, AGI and ASI
The established terminology distinguishes what a system can do and how broadly it can do it. Those differences give AI, AGI and ASI their separate meanings.
- AIArtificial intelligenceThe umbrella term. Includes systems for specific tasks and models with broader uses. AI does not itself imply human-level or superhuman capability.
- AGIArtificial general intelligenceBroad cognitive capability, often described relative to human performance. Definitions and thresholds differ; generality does not by itself mean superiority.
- ASIArtificial superintelligenceIn Bostrom’s sense: capability far beyond humans across virtually all domains of interest. A change of name provides no evidence that this level has been reached.
These terms describe different dimensions of capability. A system can outperform humans on a specific task without matching their breadth. The research framework Levels of AGI distinguishes performance from generality; it also illustrates why a single three-step ladder is a simplification. Modern language models have broad uses, and describing every such model simply as narrow AI obscures that distinction.
The distinction matters to researchers who reserve the term for a higher level of capability.
My guess is that professionals will want to save 'SI' for a higher level of AI, not so much to describe AI today. It doesn't feel like it's at that level yet.
Ben Leong, National University of Singapore, speaking to BBC News, 23 September 2026
The acronym introduces another ambiguity. SI already denotes the Système International d’Unités, the International System of Units. Technical readers would need context to distinguish the two uses.
Trump's rebranding began with a poll on X and Truth Social
Trump’s stated reason for the change concerned the impression made by the word artificial. At the United Nations, he argued that "the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake. And it is not fake. It's actually amazing." Later in the same passage: "Whoever wins superintelligence wins."
Possible replacement names had been put to a public vote three days earlier. On 19 September Trump posted a poll on X and Truth Social, arguing that "Artificial Intelligence" was "inaccurate, and very ineloquent", and offering three replacements.
A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).
Donald J. Trump, 19 September 2026 — X · Truth Social
Followers were asked to pick "the best name for this ever growing ‘Revolution’". Superior Intelligence won a plurality, with 41.5% of the vote. Three days later, at the United Nations, the announced term was Super Intelligence — two words.
Primary sources: UN Web TV — United States, General Debate, 81st Session · The White House, remarks as released · UN News, report on the address. Quotations on this page were checked against the UN recording and transcript.
The name should follow the capability
A public poll can reveal a preference for a name. It cannot establish what a machine can do. Calling existing AI superintelligence risks turning an ambition into an apparent achievement. The useful question is what performance has been demonstrated, across which tasks, and against what standard.
Superintelligence also has a business story. Safe Superintelligence, a startup co-founded by OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, was reportedly valued at $32 billion in April 2025. Among its investors is the venture capital firm co-founded by Trump adviser Marc Andreessen. Read next: the investor connections behind the name →