Artificial Intelligence News: Trump to Ban ‘AI’ Term
President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he plans to formally ban the term “artificial intelligence” from government documents, pressing ahead with his campaign to replace it with “super intelligence.” The announcement, made in a post on Truth Social, is the latest turn in the artificial intelligence news cycle that has followed the administration’s renaming push since September, and it puts one of the most familiar technology terms in the world on notice inside the federal government. The post singled out The Wall Street Journal for continuing to use the old term.
In the post, Trump asked when the Journal would start calling the technology by his preferred name, describing “artificial intelligence” as a very bad and inaccurate name and “SI (Super Intelligence)” as the name virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be. He then added that the administration would soon be officially banning the term “AI/Artificial Intelligence” in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy. The message was the bluntest statement yet of a position the president has been advancing for a month, and it turned what began as a piece of bureaucratic vocabulary into a public demand aimed at the country’s largest business newspaper.
AI News: A Month of Renaming, From Executive Order to Ban Threat
The push to retire the term began in late September, when Trump signed an executive order titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence.” The order directed every federal department and agency to stop recognising or using “artificial intelligence” and “AI” as official terminology, to the maximum extent allowed under existing law, and to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead. The change was ordered across official correspondence, public communications, government websites, reports and policy documents, while previously issued regulations, contracts, grants and historical records were left unchanged.
The order was signed on the same day the president hosted nearly two dozen technology executives at the White House for a lunch devoted to the subject. It was followed, a little more than a week later, by a second Truth Social post in which Trump wrote that the White House considered anyone who used the term “artificial intelligence,” as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term “super intelligence,” to be the enemy. Tuesday’s post is the third step in that sequence: an executive order, a public warning, and now a promise of a formal ban. Each step has widened the circle, from federal agencies, to anyone who uses the old term, to a ban covering documents and everything else.
The order also set a clock running. It gave the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology sixty days to submit proposed legislation to Congress that would establish a federal statutory definition of “super intelligence” and recommend changes to existing laws where necessary to bring them into line with the new terminology. Until that legislation exists, the order applies the existing statutory definition of artificial intelligence, set out in Title 15 of the United States Code, to the new term “super intelligence.” That interim arrangement is an admission that the renaming is, for now, a change of label rather than a change of legal substance.
Artificial Intelligence News: Why Trump Says the Name Must Go
The president’s objection turns on a single word. In his telling, calling the technology “artificial” makes it sound fake, when in his view it is anything but. He has said the systems now being built represent extreme intelligence rather than an imitation of it, and he has called “super” the best word of all, and the simplest. The executive order makes the same argument in formal language, saying that advances in technology have outgrown the original framework used to describe artificial intelligence, and that today’s frontier systems do much more than imitate or automate discrete aspects of human intelligence.
According to the order, the new systems increasingly amplify human ingenuity and unlock new forms of creativity across science, medicine and nearly every other domain. The framing presents the technology as an amplifier of American ability rather than a substitute for it: a tool that extends human intelligence should not carry a name that suggests it is counterfeit.
OpenAI News and the Tech Leaders at the Table
The September lunch that accompanied the order brought together the most powerful figures in the industry, and their presence gave the renaming an air of endorsement. Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang were seated on either side of the president, and Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Palantir’s Alex Karp and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos were among the guests. The gathering was presented as a discussion of technological advances and the safe development of advanced systems, with the president describing the sector’s growth as unprecedented and the executives stressing collaboration and safety.
At the lunch, Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson unveiled a voluntary industry pledge, the White House Accord on Superintelligence, which the president called almost like a constitution and morally binding, adding that there would be a tremendous self-policing aspect to it. The pact’s stated scope is a joint commitment on frontier responsibilities rather than a set of enforceable rules, and it commits its signatories to a shared approach to building and deploying advanced systems. The accord and the order were announced together, and together they amount to the administration’s framework for the technology: a new name, a voluntary code, and a promise of self-regulation by the companies building the systems.
The industry’s own language, however, is narrower than the president’s. Executives such as Sam Altman use the word superintelligence for a subcategory of AI still being built, a future stage beyond today’s systems. The White House order erases that distinction, so today’s chatbots and a hypothetical machine mind fall under the same label — a flattening that helps the administration present the technology as extraordinary capability rather than routine automation.
Sam Altman News and the Meaning of ‘Superintelligence’
The word the president has chosen is not new, and it already carries a meaning that complicates his use of it. The term superintelligence has been in use since 1822 for intelligence greater than humanity’s, and Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book defined it as an intellect that greatly exceeds human cognitive performance in virtually all domains. That definition anchors the most serious safety arguments in the field, and it is the sense in which many researchers use the word: not as a synonym for today’s systems, but as a label for a capability that does not yet exist and may be difficult to control.
That safety argument has grown louder this year. More than 850 people, including researchers Yoshua Bengio and Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, signed a September 2026 statement calling for a halt to superintelligence development until it can be shown to be controllable, and Steve Bannon signed a similar petition. The signatories use the word to warn about runaway capability while the administration uses it to celebrate capability — the two sides are fighting over what the word means, and the order is an attempt to settle that fight by definition.
Data Center News: The Politics Behind the Rename
The renaming has also arrived in a political context that helps explain its timing. The push has come amid domestic challenges over data centres, with protests against their construction in several states, and amid fears of job displacement as the technology spreads through white-collar work. Advisers have warned that public distrust of the technology could hurt Republicans in the midterm elections, and a technology that voters fear is getting a friendlier name. The rebrand can be read as an attempt to change the emotional register of the debate: from a foreign-sounding imitation that takes jobs, to an American superpower that extends human ability.
The administration has also created a body to carry the new language into government. The Super Intelligence Force, announced alongside the order, brings together officials from intelligence, defence, technology policy, trade regulation and federal personnel operations, and it is meant to act as the government’s main liaison with civil society, safety advocates and the private sector. Its four leaders are Jay Clayton, the Director of National Intelligence; Andrew Ferguson, the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; Emil Michael, the chief technology officer and Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering; and Scott Kupor, the director of the Office of Personnel Management. Trump said the four would report directly to him and to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, placing the task force under the White House rather than leaving the issue to a single existing department.
Technology News: What the Ban Can and Cannot Do
For all the force of the president’s language, the ban he is promising has real limits. The order does not impose a blanket ban on people or private companies using the term “artificial intelligence”: its instructions apply to the federal executive branch, and they remain subject to applicable law. The old term remains the established language across much of the technology industry, in research, in product names and in international discussion, and no executive order can reach it.
What the order can do is change how the government talks about the technology in its own documents, and that is not trivial. Federal agencies produce an enormous volume of correspondence, reports, websites and guidance, and a consistent change of vocabulary across that output would be visible to anyone who deals with the government. It would also create practical work: guidance documents rewritten, websites updated, staff briefed on the new terminology, and a running question about which documents count as relevant and which fall under the exemptions for regulations, contracts and historical records. The administration has not yet published detailed implementation guidance, and agencies are likely to apply the order unevenly until it does.
There is also a legal question that the order itself acknowledges. The term “artificial intelligence” is defined in federal statute, and the order borrows that definition for “super intelligence” as an interim measure while it works towards a separate legal definition. If Congress declines to pass the legislation the order calls for, the government could be left using a new name for a concept that the law still defines under the old one. That gap is one reason the sixty-day deadline for proposed legislative language matters, and why the administration’s next step is likely to be a bill rather than another post.
What Happens Next
The immediate question is whether the promised ban arrives as a formal document, and what it covers. Tuesday’s post spoke of banning the term in all relevant documents and everything else, which is broader language than the September order, but no new order has been published yet. The White House has not said when the ban will be issued, whether it will extend beyond the executive branch, or how it will be enforced. The Wall Street Journal, the outlet the president singled out, has not said whether it will change its usage, and there is no sign that other news organisations plan to follow the government’s lead.
The longer question is whether Congress will take up the legislative proposal the order requires. The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology has sixty days from the signing of the order to submit proposed language, putting the deadline in late November, after the midterms. A bill renaming a defined term across federal law would touch dozens of statutes and force lawmakers to choose between the president’s framing and the language the rest of the world uses. That debate, if it happens, will be the real test: a post can demand a new word, but only legislation can make it the law’s word.
For now, the episode stands as a telling piece of the administration’s technology policy: a president who has always understood the power of naming has decided the most important technology of the moment has the wrong name, and is using his office to give it a new one. The industry, the press and the public will decide whether to follow, and the answer will say something about how far a president’s vocabulary travels beyond his own government.
Source: Reuters