Can ‘super intelligence’ and a non-binding safety pact solve AI’s image problem?

President Donald Trump hosted many of the biggest names in artificial intelligence this week — in part to announce that the U.S. government isn’t calling it artificial intelligence anymore. Now it’s super intelligence.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the motivation behind the meeting and what effect it might have on the AI industry. We were all pretty skeptical that the “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” that the executives signed will amount to much, especially since — as Sean noted — it’s “deeply non-binding,” at least from a legal prospective. (Instead, Trump said he considers it “morally binding.”)

Kirsten suggested that the meeting’s real significance may have been as “a rebranding effort around AI.” (An effort that continued this weekend with Trump’s announcement of a new Super Intelligence Force.) For her, the big message was, “AI is going to kill us, it’s scary, it is going to take jobs — but super intelligence is not.”

Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Anthony Ha: Officially, by order of the president of the United States, it’s not artificial intelligence anymore, it’s super intelligence. We were talking about this last week, because this is something [Trump has] been hinting at — he doesn’t do hints, he’s been saying [it] for a while. But now it’s signed into executive order. If you’re an official U.S. representative, you are supposed to say super intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

Kirsten Korosec: Leading up to that, we should say, not only was there pushback on regulation, and we can talk about whether this executive order even does any of that — I would say no, there’s a little bit of theater there — but the important and interesting thing is that just days ago, Anthropic was really in the doghouse, if you will, in terms of what was happening behind the scenes with President Trump.