What’s the biggest issue in AI at the minute? Is it supposedly runaway models slipping out of their sandboxes in order to hack and collude with one another—actions that are prompting calls for air accident investigator-style bodies to keep AI in check? Is it the yo-yoing stock markets as a result of those incidents?

Or is it the name AI itself, and whether it should be called superior intelligence, extreme intelligence, or supreme intelligence?

Donald Trump seems to think it’s the latter. Given a pulpit and a global audience at the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week, he focused on rebranding a concept that has existed for 70 years. “The use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake,” he said. In U.S. documents, AI will be “hereinafter officially called ‘Super Intelligence’.” That was the preferred term after Trump polled his followers on Truth Social about what better to call it.

The quibble with the branding of AI isn’t exactly wrong. The “intelligence” bit of AI has always been a misnomer. But it’s not exactly the most important thing in AI at present.

Contrast that with the other AI superpower: China. President Xi Jinping used a keynote speech at Shanghai’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July to lay out four priorities for his country, and the world. Those included encouraging open-source development, keeping AI under human control, widening access to the technology, and building international rules and standards around it.

China chose to do more than speak about those issues—it put potential solutions, even if flawed ones, into place.

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