AI is now ‘super intelligence,’ but federal oversight is still missing

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President Trump’s decision to officially change how government officials refer to AI to "super intelligence" is an effort to respond to the latest push for federal oversight of AI systems. With the name change and a new agreement with AI leaders, Trump appears to be signaling that federal oversight is not coming.

In his executive order on Sept. 29, the president wrote that “super intelligence more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.” Trump informally mentioned his plan to change the name during his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 22.

“It seems to be a part of a playbook that this administration has turned to on several occasions,” said Michael Bennett, associate vice chancellor for data and AI strategy at the University of Illinois Chicago, referring to other instances in which the president has changed a traditional name. For example, he changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

No slowdown

The president also appears to be responding to heightened AI safety concerns in the tech industry and to Americans' anxieties about AI technology as the election season nears. Recently, generative AI vendors such as Anthropic and OpenAI have called for a slowdown after agents powered by their models attacked infrastructure or left testing sandbox environments. Meanwhile, Trump has sided with AI chipmaker Nvidia, saying there is no need for a collective slowdown.

Therefore, the name change might help ease anxieties and concerns among those who disagree with the president.

“This should also be read as an effort to show the American people that the administration is trying to do something,” Bennett said. “The signal seems to be ‘we’re not just sitting on our hands.’ It’s a signal about the preferred approach to governance. This is a kind of marketing style approach to titling or describing self-regulation.”