President Donald Trump posted Tuesday on Truth Social that he will soon “be officially BANNING the term, ‘AI/Artificial Intelligence,’ in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its inaccuracy.”
For over a month now, the president has been on a public crusade to rebrand “artificial intelligence” by giving it a new name, and the name he landed on is “Super Intelligence”—two words in title case. A September 29 executive order requires federal officials to use it. Further action “banning” it, as opposed to merely making its usage standard by executive order, suggests he’ll have to bolster the previous order by adding some kind of enforcement mechanism.
His latest Truth Social post seems to have been triggered by frustration with the Wall Street Journal, which, say what you will about it, refers to artificial intelligence as “artificial intelligence.”
“When will The Wall Street Journal start calling Artificial Intelligence (AI), a very bad and inaccurate name, SI (Super Intelligence), the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be[?]” Trump’s post wonders.
He can’t legally require journalists to use the phrase, but when it comes to tech CEOs, he apparently believes they agreed to do so. In recent weeks, they have largely complied with his wish—with some ambiguities and exceptions. Elon Musk has become a huge cheerleader for the phrase, going as far as to say he will change the name of the AI division of SpaceX, SpaceXAI to “SpaceXSI.” Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman doesn’t appear to have acknowledged the two-word version of the phrase at all. (Though he has written about “superintelligence,” a different concept)
But tech leaders who had previously committed to using the phrase have occasionally slipped recently. For instance, on Sunday, Elon Musk used the term “AI”—as part of the phrase “AI data centers” in an X post. Trump’s Tuesday post may serve as a reminder to the leaders who stood next to Trump at a press scrum on the White House driveway last month and nodded along with his ideas that they’re still on the hook for this one.
