When President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations in late September, he said the word “artificial” in “artificial intelligence” made the technology sound fake. Instead, he said, his government would start calling it “superintelligence,” or “SI.”

Not long after those remarks, the president made it official. He signed an executive order that instructed federal agencies to use his chosen phrase instead of AI in official communications. What Trump says goes: The Department of Justice has since told its staff to follow suit, and other government departments are likely to follow—not least because the president has now branded anyone calling it AI “THE ENEMY.”

And it’s not just the government—the tech sector has responded to Trump’s pronouncement, too. Elon Musk said on October 4 that SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI. 

The rebrand isn’t just Trump being Trump: AI’s capabilities have improved far beyond their previous limits since ChatGPT was first released in November 2022, and are reaching the point of superintelligence—a term that already means something in AI circles. (Superintelligence, in that telling, is the point at which AI systems can systematically outperform humans.) 

However, sticking the “superintelligence” label on a technology—when parts of it definitely don’t meet that standard yet—could make things worse by giving people a false sense of confidence and confusing them further. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he thought “superintelligence” was “a more accurate term” than the current branding of AI, though he doesn’t think people will find it “less scary.”

An exclusive survey for Fast Company by market research firm Early Studies validates Altman’s perspective.

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