President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday that anyone who refers to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude as “Artificial Intelligence” will be listed as an enemy. He said the White House now considers the term “Artificial Intelligence” as opposed to the “highly accepted new and more accurate term, Super Intelligence.” The statement followed an executive order directing federal agencies to adopt the new terminology.
The directive followed a lunch with AI industry leaders, including Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai, and came just weeks after Trump’s remarks at the United Nations General Assembly in which he rejected global regulation of AI and declared the technology would henceforth be called super intelligence because the word artificial makes it sound fake. Trump has also used similar linguistic tactics to rename geographic features, such as ordering a rename of Lake Ontario to Lake America and attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
Public opinion polls illustrate growing skepticism. A Quinnipiac University survey of 1,032 registered voters found 73 percent oppose building an AI data center in their community, with 55 percent of Republicans and 79 percent saying safety matters more than staying ahead in AI. Only 25 percent approved of Trump’s handling of the technology, while 71 percent would back a candidate supporting stricter guardrails. A Fox News poll reported 37 percent favorable and 60 percent unfavorable views of AI, with Democrats trusted more than Republicans for managing data centers.
The White House has listed tech CEOs—Elon Musk and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, among others—as having adopted the phrase, but major companies such as NVIDIA, Palantir, Meta, OpenAI, Google, Tesla and Anthropic have not responded to inquiries about using the new terminology. The term superintelligence already denotes an AI system that surpasses human intellect across multiple domains, a concept that fuels calls for guardrails and kill switches.
