Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of human-like thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the new field: artificial intelligence. It stuck. When you search Google Scholar for “artificial intelligence,” approximately 7,420,000 results appear. The term is utterly ubiquitous. Everyone understands it. Even for people who despise AI, the least of their worries is what we call it.
Well, not everyone. Somehow, President Donald J. Trump developed a distaste for the term, and when he doesn’t like something, he feels free to issue an edict against it. In a September 23 speech at the United Nations, he hinted that he might want to do away with the term “artificial intelligence.” His rant seemed like bluster, even for someone with a penchant for renaming gulfs, lakes, and centers for the arts. Renaming an entire field of study and America’s most pivotal industry? This week, at a White House lunch with top AI leaders, he actually pulled the trigger with an executive order declaring that “artificial intelligence” was now a verboten coinage. Instead, the government will call it “Super Intelligence.” Clearly the president expects the private sector to follow suit.
To their shame, the lords of AI meekly acquiesced. From this point on, they will presumably be known as the lords of SI.
One can’t help but see this as the ultimate presidential flex—for all the executives’ trillions of dollars and all their actual intelligence, the alpha in the room was the guy with the orange skin. Changing a name might seem like a minor matter compared to the enormity of constraining a potentially catastrophic technology. But to this crowd, artificial intelligence is much more than a bunch of letters strung together. It’s their foundation. Their identity. When they were kids reading science fiction books under the covers, the term ignited their imaginations. They built or transformed their companies in service of AI, and it's just about all they’ve talked about for the past four years.
Yet when the president used his lunch soiree to win their approval for his wacky idea to undo 70 years of history, apparently not a single person in the room expressed an objection. Not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, or Elon Musk.
Jacob Weisberg, author of the recent book Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era, views the episode as a classic Trump loyalty test, meant to assess if otherwise powerful people will demean themselves to curry the president’s favor and avoid his wrath. If you pass the loyalty test, you fail the backbone test. “The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively,” says Weisberg. “If all of those guys had just said, ‘We'll agree to the terms of the self-regulation, but we don't accept [the name change], what would he have done?”
Instead, because of the lamb-like silence of the billionaires, Trump could claim that those leaders actively blessed his idea. When a reporter in the post-lunch press gaggle mentioned AI agents, he corrected her, saying, “The name has been changed by the biggest, the, smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world.” Really?
Even using the magic of, uh, superintelligent systems like ChatGPT or Gemini, I could not find a single instance of any one of those great people previously politicking that the term artificial intelligence should be put to rest. Satya Nadella did once say that he would have preferred that AI had been called “different intelligence,” but that hasn’t dissuaded him from repeatedly using the term. And while it’s true that Mark Zuckerberg recently established a Superintelligence Lab, his company persistently pushes a product called Meta AI to its billions of users and sells what it calls AI glasses.
I asked Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI whether they were going to change instances of AI in their product names, research papers, and communications. My query to the latter two was whether they were going to change their company names to get in sync with the presidential order. As I write this, none of them have gotten back to me.
My bet is that they will do the minimum to avoid presidential ire, while trying to run out the clock until the next administration puts this bizarre idea out of its misery. It’s been suggested that the executives actually welcome a rebranding of what has become a toxic term. I’m skeptical of that, especially since the president’s mandated replacement, “super intelligence,” is a hell of a lot scarier than the original term.
From a scientific perspective the change also makes no sense. No less an expert than Nick Bostrom, the philosopher who popularized the term superintelligence in an eponymous book, seems baffled by the idea. Superintelligence, he explained to me in an email, “refers specifically to systems that greatly surpass all the best human brains. ‘AI’ has referred to a much broader category of systems, which includes, for example, email spam filters, spell checkers, simple navigation systems, early LLMs, and the chess engines of the ’70s that didn’t yet match the best human chess players. It seems awkward to refer to these as ‘superintelligent.’”
So what is the president’s reason for demanding the change, besides because he can? In his UN speech, he said he didn’t like the term because “the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake. And it is not fake.” What is fake, he said after the White House lunch, is the term “artificial intelligence.” “It’s a fake word, it’s not good, an inappropriate term.” You don’t need to be a psychologist to see how this impulse might be associated with his decision to bounce CNN, Politico, and MSNow from the White House, because he perceives their news as “fake.”
Still, the leap that equates artificial with fake doesn’t track. In 1956, McCarthy used it to distinguish between human intelligence and the machine version of intelligence. The problem isn’t that the term leads people to regard AI’s output as fake—in fact, it’s so real that we human beings often can’t tell whether we’re dealing with an AI model or a human. Mandating that the distinction be explicit, with watermarks and labels, should be one element of the AI regulation that the White House seems allergic to.
As Weisberg notes, it’s very much in character for Trump to make a crazy edict like this one. What’s disturbing is the glaring lack of character from the executives who didn’t push back. They left with the prize of self-regulation instead of strict oversight, but not with their dignity.
But failure to defend the freedom to refer to artificial intelligence as artificial intelligence (as California governor Gavin Newsom decreed in his own Trump-trolling executive order) casts doubt on even that agreement. Making voluntary standards effective requires considerable fortitude, as prioritizing safety can be at odds with financial and competitive factors. Yet we are being asked to trust these supposedly independent corporate giants who nodded like bobbleheads while a technologically unschooled crank-in-chief demanded they abandon the term at the center of their lives and livelihoods. Inappropriate, and fake.
