President Trump used his address to the UN General Assembly today to announce the U.S. will start referring to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” in official government documents, while flatly rejecting any international effort to regulate, tax, or oversee the technology's development.
Why it matters: It's Trump's most explicit framing yet of AI as a zero-sum global power contest rather than a technology to be jointly governed — delivered at the same UN session where other world leaders have pushed for coordinated international AI oversight.
Driving the news:
Trump told the Assembly the U.S. would change its own terminology and “hopefully” pull the rest of the world along with it, calling “super” “the much more accurate term” for the technology.
He rejected any international control scheme outright, telling delegates the U.S. “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” AI, and ruled out global taxes on the industry.
Trump cast AI leadership as winner-take-all, claiming the U.S. is “leading now over China by a lot and everyone else.”
The administration paired the rhetoric with a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” holding AI companies responsible for infrastructure-buildout costs, according to Fox Business.
Rather than new regulation, Trump said oversight of AI would run through the Justice Department, not a new regulatory regime.
What they're saying:
“All of the United States documents and hopefully the world's will be changed to use the much more accurate term super as opposed to artificial.” — Trump, per Fox News
“I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.” — Trump, per Fox Business
“The United States leads the world in superintelligence and will continue to do so safely and responsibly.” — Trump, per Fox Business
The bottom line: Trump is using the world's biggest diplomatic stage to lock in a policy posture as much as a name change — aggressive federal backing for AI's expansion, paired with a rejection of outside checks on it, international or otherwise.
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