Not the First Version Proposed

The idea didn't come out of nowhere. Three days before the speech, on September 19, Trump launched a poll on Truth Social asking his followers to choose between "Superior Intelligence," "Extreme Intelligence," and "Supreme Intelligence," arguing that the term "artificial" sounds inaccurate and inelegant. At the same time, he also announced the creation of an "AI Force," a structure dedicated to developing artificial intelligence, calling fears of a superintelligence spiraling out of control exaggerated.

An Already Familiar Pattern

Renaming AI fits into a pattern Trump has followed since returning to the White House. The Gulf of Mexico officially became the "Gulf of America" by executive order, a decision Mexico never accepted, and which the Associated Press also refused to adopt. At the end of August, Lake Ontario, located on the US-Canada border, was renamed "Lake America" by executive order, amid an escalating trade war with Ottawa. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the decision, noting that the lake's name, derived from the Wendat language, is more than 400 years old. Trump went even further, joking (or at least we think he was joking) that, having already claimed a gulf and a lake with an American name, "all that's missing now is an ocean."

Coming back to "super intelligence," the renaming continues a broader push by the Trump administration on AI: in July 2025, the "AI Action Plan" was launched, a package of more than 90 federal measures meant to maintain US supremacy in the field, following an executive order signed in January 2025 calling for AI development "free from ideological bias." The order was presented as the opposite of the previous administration's approach: less regulation centered on safety and ethics, more emphasis on US technological dominance and on eliminating what Trump called "ideology" from the way AI models are trained and used by the government.

These actions tie directly into the UN speech: beyond the branding angle, the gesture says something about Trump's view of technology. It isn't seen as a mere imitation of human intelligence, but as a form of power — economic, technological, and geopolitical — whose name should, in his view, reflect superiority rather than artificiality.

SI, Trump's latest branding whim, represents for the current US administration a tool of national power — not a technology that should be reined in by international rules.