President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on September 22 that the United States would rename artificial intelligence "super intelligence" in official communications and refused to join any international framework for governing the technology1,5.
"The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control… artificial intelligence," Trump said.
Trump argued the word "artificial" undersold the technology, saying it made AI "sound fake" when it is "actually amazing". He had days earlier launched a social-media poll asking followers to choose among "Superior Intelligence," "Extreme Intelligence," and "Supreme Intelligence" as alternative names.
Safety warnings equated with climate debate
Trump dismissed AI safety advocates by likening their concerns to climate-change warnings. "The very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming… are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster," he said. He falsely characterized climate change as a hoax that has not lived up to warnings of its dangers. Trump has twice pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement and his administration has rolled back emissions regulations and slashed funding for climate research.
Trump framed AI dominance as a competitive imperative, saying "whoever masters the technology first wins" and that he would not "stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution".
Broader diplomatic context
The speech landed as leaders of more than 20 mostly European countries urged binding safety measures for advanced AI, warning that development could outpace the ability to control it. Neither China nor the United States endorsed that proposal.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the U.S. and China to open a dialogue on AI's future comparable to U.S.-Soviet engagement during the Cold War, saying governments with the greatest AI capabilities bear the greatest responsibilities to humanity. China and the U.S. were reportedly discussing a communication channel for AI concerns ahead of a Washington summit between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping scheduled for Thursday.
France initiated a UN Security Council meeting on AI, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was set to speak on Wednesday. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue were set to participate remotely. Both Altman and Amodei have recently called for greater regulation and pacing of the technology.
ANALYSIS The gap between the administration's position and the public stances of leading U.S. AI companies is now explicit: the firms whose models would be subject to international rules are asking for the coordination that Trump has categorically refused.
The rebranding follows a pattern of Trump-era renaming efforts, including the executive-order change of the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" and the August renaming of Lake Ontario to "Lake America" during a trade dispute with Canada. Trump has also floated renaming the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.