President Trump says government documents will use 'superintelligence' instead of 'artificial intelligence,' and AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has criticized the move. A Liberty Times headline says Hinton argued it shows Trump knows almost nothing about AI.
According to Colombia's El País, Trump said at the United Nations on September 22 that the United States would start calling artificial intelligence 'superintelligence.' He said all government documents would switch to the new term, which he called more accurate and better suited to a technology he expects to have a bigger impact than the Industrial Revolution or the internet. The Liberty Times later reported, on October 9, that Trump posted on Truth Social on October 8 that the White House considers anyone who says 'AI' rather than 'Super Intelligence' (SI) an enemy.
광고 문의 · 300×250The Liberty Times said Trump had earlier lunched with AI industry figures including Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai and Dario Amodei, then signed an executive order directing federal agencies to rename the AI they already use as superintelligence. The order covers federal agencies, not private firms, but some companies, including Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, have adopted the term, and Musk recently used it on X. The report did not say whether the renaming changes regulation or investment in practice.
In the same UN speech, Trump said the United States would not put the brakes on AI development. El País reported that he would 'encourage' superintelligence under Department of Justice oversight and would oppose any globalist framework to govern AI. He framed AI as a race with China that the United States is winning, and likened warnings about its risks to earlier predictions about climate change.
Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of modern AI, was quoted by a summary site, Hakky Handbook, as saying Trump does not really understand AI and is receiving misguided advice. That page says its text was AI-generated and urges readers to check the original, and we could not confirm the primary source. We also could not verify the context or date of the 'knows almost nothing' wording in the Liberty Times headline.
The dispute goes beyond vocabulary to the direction of AI policy. The administration is reported to favor voluntary safeguards, which some experts worry are not adequate regulation, while its side argues that not hampering innovation is how the United States stays ahead of China. We could not confirm whether the White House or Trump has directly answered Hinton. How Justice Department oversight will work, and what stance Washington takes in international AI talks, are the points to watch.
