Trump bans the word 'AI' across the US government

If you thought tech marketing was already out of hand, the White House just took it to a whole new level.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order requiring all US executive branch agencies to wipe the term “artificial intelligence” from their official vocabulary. Moving forward, government policy websites, official documents, and press releases must refer to it strictly as “Super Intelligence.”

Federal officials are now expected to avoid acknowledging the terms “AI” or “artificial intelligence” altogether in relevant policy settings.

Out with "artificial", in with "super"

The announcement came right after a high-powered White House tech CEO luncheon. Trump made his public remarks flanked by Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk, with a heavyweight room that included Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.

Trump didn’t mince words when explaining the rebrand. He called “super” the best and simplest word of all, while dismissing “artificial” as sounding too much like “fake news.”

In Trump’s view, the technology is simply too brilliant and powerful to be called artificial. He argued the rebrand would help ease public fears about runaway safety risks, noting he had already floated the idea at the United Nations General Assembly and claimed Chinese President Xi Jinping liked the term during his White House visit.

Beyond the name change, the gathered tech executives signed an AI safety pledge that Trump described as “morally binding.”

On actual oversight, Trump pushed for heavy industry self-regulation, arguing that existing agencies like the DOJ and FBI provide all the guardrails needed. He also brushed off local backlash against power-hungry infrastructure, insisting tech firms will share economic perks with communities and that "data centers are going to be very popular."

Existing laws and historical filings won’t be rewritten, but all future federal communications will follow the new branding mandate.

Why it matters

Basically, rebranding AI through an executive order doesn’t make the models any smarter, but it sends a massive policy signal.

Inside the industry, “superintelligence” describes a theoretical, god-like machine intelligence that we are nowhere close to achieving. Slapping that label on today’s probabilistic chatbots and automation tools feels like pure political theater. As TechCrunch pointed out, you can call it AI or Super Intelligence, but only about 2% of consumers are actually paying for these products right now.

For the tech giants in that room, however, the real win wasn't the semantic shift. It was the regulatory posture.

By leaning entirely on voluntary self-regulation, "morally binding" pledges, and White House cheerleading for controversial local data centers, the administration is clearing the runway for massive infrastructure expansion.

We think the immediate risk lies in legal and policy coherence. Blurring the statutory definition of AI by replacing a precise term with a vague, hype-laden buzzword will make crafting sensible safety rules or liability standards down the road significantly harder.