The Great Rebrand: Tech's Billionaires Trade Identity for Political Favor
AI-generated image · US National Wire
The sudden pivot from 'Artificial Intelligence' to 'Super Intelligence' isn't a scientific evolution—it's a calculated surrender to the White House.
OPINION: Let's be clear about what happened at the recent White House lunch. This wasn't a meeting of the minds or a scientific pivot toward precision. It was a surrender.
As Wired first reported, President Donald J. Trump has issued an executive order declaring the term "artificial intelligence" a "verboten coinage," mandating that the government instead use the term "Super Intelligence." While the president claims in a United Nations speech that he dislikes the term because "artificial" implies the intelligence is "fake," the real story is the reaction of the tech elite.
Despite spending years obsessing over AI, the industry's most powerful figures—including Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Greg Brockman, Alex Karp, and Elon Musk—offered no objection to this erasure of 70 years of history. As Wired reports, this silence allowed the president to later claim that the "biggest, the smartest, the greatest people" in the world had blessed the change.
This isn't about linguistics; it's about leverage. Jacob Weisberg, author of *Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era*, describes the episode to Wired as a "classic Trump loyalty test" designed to see if powerful executives would demean themselves to avoid presidential wrath and curry favor.
Furthermore, the shift is scientifically nonsensical. Philosopher Nick Bostrom, who popularized the term "superintelligence" in his own book, told Wired that "superintelligence" specifically refers to systems that greatly surpass all human brains. In contrast, "AI" covers a broad spectrum, including early LLMs, spell checkers, and 1970s chess engines. Calling a spam filter "superintelligent" is, as Bostrom puts it, "awkward."
Even the companies themselves are in a state of contradiction. While they acquiesced to the president, Wired notes that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta continues to sell "AI glasses" and market "Meta AI," despite Zuckerberg having established a Superintelligence Lab.
When asked if they would update product names, research papers, or company titles to align with the executive order, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and xAI have yet to respond. This silence suggests a strategy of doing the bare minimum to avoid ire while waiting for the political clock to run out. For these executives, the bottom line is more important than the terminology that defined their careers.