Trump Orders Government to Stop Saying 'AI' — Now It's 'Super Intelligence'

President Trump signed an executive order that bans the US government from using the phrase 'artificial intelligence' in official settings. From now on, federal websites, policy papers, and press releases will say 'Super Intelligence' instead. Trump announced it while launching a government website called America.gov, saying, 'The word super is the best word of all, and it's the simplest.' He added that 'artificial' reminds him of 'fake news,' and that the technology is 'very powerful' and 'very brilliant.'

The order came right after a White House lunch with tech leaders, including Nvidia's Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX. Trump called the meeting 'very productive' and said there's 'a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation' — meaning companies mostly police themselves, with the Justice Department and FBI stepping in when needed. He also predicted that local opposition to giant data centers (warehouse-sized buildings full of computers that power AI) will fade, saying 'data centers are going to be very popular.'

Here's the practical part for you. Nothing about how AI actually works changed on Tuesday. Your phone's assistant, the chatbot writing your emails, and the AI reading your medical scans behave exactly the same. Existing regulations stay on the books, and no one has to rewrite old documents. What changed is the vocabulary — and vocabulary quietly steers public opinion and political will. Calling something 'super' makes it sound like a marvel; calling it 'artificial' makes it sound synthetic, and slightly untrustworthy.

That's why this isn't just a branding stunt. Names shape budgets, safety rules, and lawsuits. If officials are discouraged from even saying 'AI,' it becomes harder for regulators to talk plainly about harms like deepfakes, biased hiring tools, or job losses. Meanwhile, 'superintelligence' already means something specific in the industry: an AI smarter than humans at nearly everything — a far more dramatic claim than the everyday AI you use now. Blurring those two ideas can make ordinary software sound either more magical or more menacing than it is.