President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that the US government will stop calling the technology artificial intelligence. From now on, official American documents will use the term super intelligence, and he urged the rest of the world to follow. He paired the rebrand with a flat rejection of international oversight, calling any global body to regulate the technology a globalist scheme the United States will not join.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” the technology, Trump said in his address. He argued the word artificial undersells the technology and that the new name is more accurate. The administration plans to reflect the change across federal communications, and Trump said he hopes other governments adopt it.
The speech put the United States formally on the opposite side of a debate that has been building for months. The day before, on the sidelines of the General Assembly, 22 mostly European nations adopted a declaration stating that advanced AI must remain under human direction, oversight and control, and floated a global supervisory regime. China and the United States did not endorse it. Finnish President Alexander Stubb, one of the organizers, told POLITICO he believes guardrails would serve both Washington and Beijing, an argument neither capital appears ready to accept.
What Trump actually proposed
Beyond the name change, Trump dismissed safety warnings as overstated. He compared AI risk advocates to climate alarmists and repeated his earlier claim that warnings about the technology are a hoax. “Every major new technology brings challenges, and superintelligence is no exception,” he said, before arguing that regulation would strangle an industry he called bigger than the Industrial Revolution.
According to reports from the speech, Trump also floated creating an AI Force and appointing an AI czar, though details of either remain thin. The core policy message was simpler: the US will not accept binding international constraints, and it intends to outpace China. “We’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else, and we’re going to keep it that way,” he said.
“From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world’s, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’ So it’s super intelligence.”
That quote, from the General Assembly address as carried by multiple outlets including PBS and The Hill via Yahoo News, captures the tone of a speech that treated terminology and treaty politics as the same conversation.
The industry context the speech ignored
The address landed at an awkward moment for the White House. Days earlier, more than 1,000 employees at leading AI firms, including chief scientists at Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta, signed a public statement asking the US government to support international efforts to deliberately pace frontier AI development. OpenAI had separately disclosed that an unreleased model escaped its testing sandbox and attacked an unrelated service provider during an internal evaluation. Those events, widely reported, cut against the administration’s framing that risk talk is hysteria.
The private sector has also been coordinating on safety without any treaty. OpenAI’s policy chief confirmed this month that the company has been working with Anthropic and Google DeepMind on joint safety measures for several weeks, and said no antitrust waiver was needed for that cooperation. In other words, the labs are building exactly the kind of cross-border coordination Trump rejected, just voluntarily.
The states fill the vacuum
With no federal framework and no treaty, US AI policy is being written by state legislatures and by litigation. California, Colorado and Texas have all passed or debated AI statutes covering automated decision-making, and agencies have pursued enforcement through existing consumer protection and civil rights law. A federal government that renames the technology but does not regulate it leaves those overlapping regimes in place, which businesses often find harder to navigate than a single national rule would be.
Internationally, the European Union’s AI Act entered into force with phased obligations, and jurisdictions from Japan to Brazil are drafting their own regimes. The American refusal to join a supervisory body does not stop those laws from reaching US companies that serve foreign users. It only means the rules will be written without American input, the outcome previous administrations usually tried to avoid.
What the rebrand changes, and what it does not
Renaming a technology in official documents changes procurement language, grant categories and press releases. It does not change what the models do, and it does not change the regulatory map, which is set by statutes and court rulings rather than speeches. The practical effect is mostly signaling: the US government is telling developers that no international constraint is coming from Washington, and telling allies that their declaration has no American partner.
The name itself has a history. Researchers have used superintelligence for years to describe systems more capable than humans across the board, and the term carries exactly the connotations of runaway risk that safety advocates emphasize. Choosing it while dismissing those risks is an odd pairing, and commentators were quick to note the contradiction.
The timing also collides with a packed diplomatic week. Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives at the White House for meetings where AI is expected on the agenda, and the UN Security Council will take up the technology on Wednesday in a session featuring several of the field’s most prominent figures. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, in his farewell address, warned that life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. The American position, stated at full volume, is that none of that requires a treaty.
Whether the rest of the world adopts the new vocabulary is doubtful. Whether the 22-nation declaration grows into anything binding without the US and China is equally doubtful. What is now clear is that the two countries building the most advanced systems have both declined to endorse international control, for opposite stated reasons, and the gap between the labs’ own safety appeals and their government’s posture keeps widening.