US President Donald Trump has called for artificial intelligence to be rebranded as «super intelligence», arguing that the word «artificial» unfairly makes the technology sound fake. The intervention, made during a speech at the UN General Assembly on 22 September, has been backed by an executive order signed on 29 September and the launch of a new body called the Super Intelligence Force to coordinate American AI policy.
The executive order states that the term «Super Intelligence» more appropriately captures the promise, potential and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies. But the rebrand has reignited a long-running debate about what exactly the different labels in AI actually mean, and whether the shift is a genuine clarification or a political manoeuvre to cement US dominance in the field.
Trump is not the first to try to move the goalposts. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg published a note last year declaring that «superintelligence» is now in sight. The word was originally popularised by philosopher Nick Bostrom as the title of his 2014 book, where he defined it as any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.
That definition is far more demanding than the capabilities of today's AI systems. A true superintelligence would need to surpass not only the greatest scientists but also the greatest artists, writers and thinkers in history. By that standard, no existing system comes close.
The confusion stems from decades of shifting terminology. Long before ChatGPT, researchers distinguished between weak AI and strong AI, terms first defined by philosopher John Searle in a 1980 paper. Searle considered weak AI to be a computer simulation of a human mind, while strong AI would involve actual cognition emerging from software. He dismissed the latter idea as ridiculous, asking why anyone would suppose that a computer simulation of understanding actually understood anything.
In the wake of Searle's paper, the debate moved from philosophy to computer science. Weak AI merged with the term narrow AI, meaning a system capable of human-level performance at a specific task. Such systems have been with us for decades, from spam filters to chess engines to driverless cars. Once a task becomes achievable by narrow AI, it tends to be reclassified as ordinary software, a phenomenon known as the AI effect.
Strong AI gave way to general AI, a system capable of human-level performance at any task. In 2002, that concept morphed into artificial general intelligence, or AGI, largely due to Shane Legg, who later co-founded DeepMind. Most major AI companies, including DeepMind and OpenAI, were founded with the stated goal of achieving AGI. In the 2010s this was seen as a slightly wacky, sci-fi research goal. Today it is a business model, with trillions of dollars of investment riding on building an AGI in the near future.
Yet definitions of AGI remain woolly. OpenAI's charter describes it as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. A leaked 2024 agreement between OpenAI and Microsoft defined it as a system capable of generating $100 billion in profit. OpenAI is not yet profitable, with expenditure far exceeding revenue, but that did not stop its president, Greg Brockman, from saying «welcome to the AGI era» with the release of its Astra model in September.
However AGI is defined, it is not the same as superintelligence. Bostrom's concept describes an intellect that greatly exceeds human cognitive performance across virtually all domains. That would mean surpassing every human scientist, artist and philosopher who has ever lived. We have clearly not achieved that.
The deeper problem running through all these definitions lies in the second part of the phrase: what actually is intelligence, and how do we measure differences between systems? Until that question is answered, the rebranding of AI as super intelligence is likely to add more confusion than clarity, even as it shapes the political and commercial narrative around the technology.