Trump wants to rename AI ‘super intelligence’ — and he might have a point

This week at the UN General Assembly, President Trump announced that the US government will start referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” in its official documents. His reasoning? That the word “artificial” “makes intelligence sound fake” — when, in his view, it’s anything but.

I’ll leave the politics to one side. But as someone who works with this technology every single day, I read that and thought: he’s put his finger on something real.

How “artificial” is AI, really?

Think about where AI actually comes from. Every model — ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, all of them — is trained on human output. Our writing. Our code. Our conversations. Our decisions, and centuries of accumulated human knowledge. There is nothing conjured from thin air here. What these systems do is distil and remix us, at enormous scale and speed.

So the intelligence inside AI isn’t really artificial at all — it’s borrowed human intelligence, reflected back at us. And I’d argue the word “artificial” does us a disservice, because it nudges people toward one of two unhelpful conclusions: either “it’s fake, it’s hype, ignore it”, or “it’s some alien machine brain we’ll never understand”. Neither is true.

Is “super” any better?

Whether “super intelligence” is the right replacement is a fair question. In the industry the term already has a specific meaning — an AI that surpasses human intelligence across the board, which, for the record, we are not at yet. So it carries some baggage.

But for the average business owner trying to make sense of all this, I can see the argument. “Super” captures something “artificial” misses: this is powerful, it’s fast, it’s seriously capable — and crucially, it’s built on human knowledge, not magicked out of nowhere. If a clearer name helps more people take it seriously, without either dismissing it or fearing it, that’s no bad thing.

The name matters less than the understanding

Here’s where I land. Frankly, you can call it artificial intelligence, super intelligence or Kevin — what matters is that businesses understand what it truly is: a powerful tool, built on human data, that inherits human strengths and human flaws.

Because that’s the part that affects you. AI trained on human data carries human bias and human error. And if you feed it your confidential information without thinking, it can leak your business’s data just as easily as it summarises your emails. That’s why, whatever we end up calling it, how you secure and govern AI matters far more than what’s printed on the label — and it’s why we help clients put a simple AI usage policy in place and keep an eye on shadow AI.

So — does the President have a point? On the narrow question of whether “artificial” is a good word for something built entirely out of human intelligence, I think he really does. Whether “super intelligence” is the answer, time will tell. But the real work for the rest of us isn’t arguing about the name. It’s making sure we use this remarkable, and very human, technology deliberately and safely.

Source: President Trump’s address to the UN General Assembly, 22 September 2026, as reported by The Hill, The Washington Post and others. This article reflects the author’s personal opinion.