Trump doubles down on 'super intelligence' branding with AI terminology executive order

The Trump administration’s push to rebrand AI as “super intelligence” and to treat use of the old terminology as almost disloyal might sound cosmetic, but it is a revealing window into how political narratives around AGI are being engineered. By collapsing today’s systems and speculative AGI into a single, more dramatic label, the White House is trying to frame the technology as both inevitable and closely tied to American power, much like the space race rhetoric in the 1960s. Giving the science adviser 60 days to propose statutory rewrites for the new terms signals that this is not just branding, but an attempt to rewrite the legal language that will govern advanced systems. ([tokenpost.com](https://www.tokenpost.com/news/regulation/28381))

For the race to AGI, the terminology war matters because it influences how the public and legislators think about risk and control. “Super intelligence” foregrounds capability and dominance, which can justify massive national investments and looser brakes in the name of beating rivals, while making it harder to talk about more prosaic but urgent issues like workplace automation or bias. It also risks fragmenting global governance if US statutes start using SI while allies and existing treaties are written in terms of AI. Companies will be forced to map one vocabulary onto another in compliance, export controls and liability regimes. In the short term this is noise; in the medium term, it could shape which risks and benefits are politically salient as we get closer to genuinely transformative systems.