Trump’s AI adviser co-founded a firm that backs a superintelligence startup
Before Trump proposed renaming AI, superintelligence was already a company name and an investment thesis. Safe Superintelligence counts Andreessen Horowitz among its backers. The venture capital firm’s co-founder, Marc Andreessen, is also a Trump adviser and donor. That overlap deserves scrutiny, with clear limits on what it establishes.
On 22 September 2026, Trump announced at the UN General Assembly that the US would replace artificial intelligence with super intelligence. A public poll on possible names had preceded the speech. The political announcement brought an existing commercial vocabulary to a new audience.
Superintelligence was already part of company branding before the poll. Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) made it the company name. One of its investors is a venture capital firm whose co-founder advises and has financially supported Trump.
Ilya Sutskever founded SSI with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. His exit from OpenAI followed the November 2023 board vote that briefly removed Sam Altman — Sutskever was one of the directors who backed it. In April 2025, TechCrunch reported that the company had raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation. Its name describes its development ambition.
Among its backers is the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which took part in both the first round and the round that set that valuation. The firm's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, advises the Trump administration on artificial intelligence: he sits on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and was appointed to the president's tech advisory council in March 2026. In 2024 he and Ben Horowitz each gave $2.5 million to Right for America, a pro-Trump super PAC; Andreessen gave a further $844,600 — the federal maximum — to Trump's campaign and the Republican Party.
These links establish an overlap between SSI’s investors and Trump’s political circle. The evidence cited here does not establish that SSI or its investors influenced the renaming.
The shared vocabulary also serves different purposes. SSI describes safe superintelligence as its development goal. Trump’s speech used the term for AI while rejecting international regulation of the technology.
What domain registrations for "superintelligence" show
Beyond company names and funding, domain registrations provide a separate record of activity around the vocabulary. The Superintelligence in Domain Names, carried out by Generell AI in September 2026, examines names selected before their registration dates were inspected. The study compares dates around two public announcements. Creation dates identify recorded events; they do not reveal purchasers’ motives or date the adoption of a word across an industry.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. was announced on 19 June 2024. In the sample, 17 of 65 cognition-related .si names (26.2%) have creation dates from 19 to 26 June, compared with one of 61 everyday-noun controls (1.6%). These are descriptive counts, not estimates for the wider domain market.
In a separate list of 39 plausible reaction names, five have creation dates on 22–23 September 2026 and sixteen returned “record not found”. A sixth recent registration, superintelligencepolicy.com, appears in the 13-domain .com file, dated 22 September. These samples cannot establish whether the 2026 response was stronger or weaker than the 2024 activity.
The evidence supports a cluster of registrations around SSI’s launch in this selected sample. Registry queries returned 162 registration records and 16 “record not found” responses across the four samples. The results do not establish motives, independent buyers, causation or an industry-wide shift. Most names in the main list describe cognition generally, rather than containing the word superintelligence.
Datasets, calculations and limitations.
A registry query log is included.
Superintelligence was already big business
Before Trump announced the rebrand, investors had committed billions to a startup whose stated goal was safe superintelligence. One of its backers was the venture capital firm co-founded by his adviser and donor Marc Andreessen. The term already had a commercial history, including a connection to the president’s own political circle.
The domain study adds a separate observation: registrations clustered around SSI’s launch within the selected sample. It does not connect those registrations to Trump or his advisers. The investment and advisory relationships are documented; the evidence cited here does not show that SSI or its investors helped choose the new name.