TURTLE BAY — President Trump unveiled his new nickname for artificial intelligence during a Tuesday speech to the United Nations General Assembly, while affirming the US would “rein in” the technology if necessary but opposing international regulatory efforts.
Trump said that using “the word artificial” for artificial intelligence “makes it sound fake and it is not fake — it’s actually amazing,” before deploying the term he’d been workshopping for days online instead.
America, the president said, “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much — now, here and after, officially called ‘super intelligence.’”
“Whoever wins ‘super intelligence’ wins. That’s the group that wins,” he cautioned. “And we’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. And we’re going to keep it that way.”
“I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution, many say bigger than the industrial revolution or the internet itself. And we will be very careful, and that’s why we have a Department of Justice, and we’ve already used it having to do with this very subject and used it very powerfully,” Trump continued.
“Everything worked out very well and very quickly. And other law enforcement bodies that will rein things in if we have to do that, but we will only encourage superintelligence. We’re going to encourage it, not rein it in,” he said. “We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice. The United States leads the world in superintelligence and will continue.”
Members of Congress and top AI bosses like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have been calling for government intervention to slow the pace of innovation so that adequate guardrails can be put in place.
In response, Trump launched a new “AI Force” and said he’d be appointing an AI “czar” in a Saturday post on Truth Social.
He also asked whether “Superior Intelligence,” “Extreme Intelligence” or “Supreme Intelligence” might be better alternative names to artificial intelligence.
“This is a Poll, and I would appreciate everybody voting! Which is the best name for this ever growing ‘Revolution?’” he asked his followers over the weekend.
Cabinet officials have echoed the president’s warnings about burdensome regulations crushing AI innovations, while initiating high-level discussions with other countries about the new technology.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested Sunday that nations adopt a hotline to contact one other in the event of a dangerous, AI-driven incident, a proposal he discusssed with his Chinese counterpart, He Lifeng.
“If there is an AI incident that’s dangerous and could impact economies or societies and even lead to a conflict between nation states, we would have the ability to immediately hotline the Chinese and warn them about it or vice versa,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning.
“But this issue of AI is it’s not new. We really should have started dealing with this two or three years ago, but it’s here now. You’ve seen all the warnings out there. I know people are very concerned about it,” Rubio added.
“And it isn’t a national thing. You can’t build a border around AI because it’s going to be global. So you’re going to have to engage on the global space.”
