A Name Is a Claim: Why Washington Cannot Rebrand AI as "Superintelligence" by Decree
On September 22, 2026, President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that United States government documents would stop saying "artificial intelligence" and start saying "super intelligence," because the word "artificial" makes the technology "sound fake." Within hours, the State Department instructed its diplomatic missions to make the change in all documents and positions. On September 29, after a White House lunch with more than two dozen technology executives, the President signed an executive order titled "Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence," binding every federal agency to the term. The problem is not that a president chose a new word. The problem is that the word already means something specific, and scientific terms are not settled by whoever holds the most power in the room. For security professionals, that confusion will show up in threat assessments, treaty language, and procurement contracts.
Where the Word "Artificial Intelligence" Came From
The story begins with a question, not a declaration. In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the philosophy journal Mind. He opened with a simple sentence: "Can machines think?" Turing did not answer with a label. He proposed a test. If a machine could hold a conversation that a human judge could not distinguish from a human's, then the question of "thinking" became a question of evidence rather than opinion. Turing also warned, in the same paper, that settling the meaning of words by "a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll" would be "absurd." Last week, the President chose the government's new term by polling his social media followers on whether they preferred "super intelligence" or "superior intelligence."
Five years later, on August 31, 1955, four researchers, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon, wrote a proposal for a summer workshop at Dartmouth College. That document introduced the phrase "artificial intelligence." It was a research proposal, not a royal decree. The term survived because thousands of scientists tested it, argued over it, and built a discipline around it over seven decades. Its meaning today is the product of that long argument, not of the four men who first typed it.
"In science, a name is a claim. Claims are reviewed. That rule does not bend for presidents."
What the Taxonomy Actually Says
Researchers and policy analysts commonly sort AI into three tiers, and governance training adds a fourth. Understanding them explains why the rebrand is a category error.
Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI). Systems that perform specific tasks well: facial recognition at a border crossing, fraud detection at a bank, language translation, or the chatbots now used across government offices. Every deployed AI system today is narrow.
Broad Artificial Intelligence (ABI). An intermediate tier used in professional governance training, including the International Association of Privacy Professionals' AI Governance Professional curriculum. It describes systems that handle a broader set of tasks than narrow AI, often by combining several AI systems, but remain well short of general intelligence. The IAPP cites AI agents as an example. The term appears in training materials rather than in the peer-reviewed research literature, which still uses three tiers.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). A hypothetical system that could learn, reason, and adapt across most domains at a human level. No such system exists, and the definition itself is still debated.
Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). A hypothetical system that would exceed the best human minds in nearly every field. Nick Bostrom's 2014 book "Superintelligence" made the term standard in policy circles. It is the very thing that more than 850 scientists and public figures, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, asked the world to pause in an open letter in October 2025.
Note the pattern. Even the intermediate tier arrived with a written definition, a stated boundary on each side, and an example. That is how vocabulary is supposed to enter a field.
The consequence is plain. When a State Department cable now refers to a spam filter as "super intelligence," the same word describes both a routine software tool and a hypothetical future system that leading researchers consider an existential risk. One word, two meanings, and no way for a reader in Abuja, Brussels, or Beijing to know which one Washington intends.
How Science Names Things
The naming of scientific concepts follows established review. The examples are everywhere.
Elements. When a laboratory discovers a new chemical element, the discoverers propose a name, but the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry reviews it, opens it to public comment, and only then approves it. Element 113 became nihonium in 2016 through exactly this process.
Planets. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union voted to define the word "planet." Pluto lost its status because astronomers reviewed the evidence and set a standard, not because a leader disliked it.
Diseases. On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization named the new coronavirus disease "COVID-19" under naming guidelines adopted in 2015, which bar names that stigmatize places or people. Each of these systems exists for one reason. Shared meaning makes cooperation possible. A physician in Lagos and a physician in Houston treat the same disease because they call it the same thing.
An Analyst's View
The strongest objection to this article is fair, so let us state it. A president has authority over the vocabulary of his own government's documents. Governments rename departments and programs all the time. Nobody elected the International Astronomical Union. Moreover, "artificial" does confuse ordinary people.
That objection wins on authority and loses on consequence. A word is a tool for coordination. Diplomats will now use a term that their counterparts read as "machines smarter than humans." Analysts writing a threat assessment on a Chinese "super intelligence" program must clarify in every paragraph whether they mean an advanced model or the hypothetical ASI. Contracting officers must define the term in every solicitation. The rebrand does not make the technology more real. It makes the paperwork less precise, at the exact moment when precision about AI capability is a matter of national security.
A second concern is structural rather than personal. "Superintelligence" was a corporate brand before it was federal policy. Meta named its research division Meta Superintelligence Labs in 2025. Ilya Sutskever's company is called Safe Superintelligence Inc. The companies whose leaders signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence have a commercial interest in the word sounding like an achievement rather than a warning. The accord itself is voluntary and self-policed, and CNBC reports that its text makes no declaration about the name at all; the term appears only in its title. Peer review has been replaced by an agreement among the parties being reviewed. That is the reverse of how a scientific field earns trust.
"A word is a tool for coordination. Break the tool, and every treaty, assessment, and contract that depends on it becomes harder to read."
Conclusion: Precision Is a Security Requirement
Turing gave the field a question. McCarthy and his colleagues gave it a name. Seventy years of reviewed research gave that name its meaning. A poll cannot overwrite that record, and an executive order cannot make a spam filter superintelligent. What a directive can do is inject ambiguity into the documents on which security professionals depend. Leaders who want to win the AI race should insist on the discipline that made the field possible: define your terms, submit them to review, and let evidence, not preference, decide what a machine is called.
How OSRS can help. OGUN Security Research and Strategic Consulting provides AI threat assessments, policy analysis, and executive briefings that separate verified capability from marketing language. Contact us to schedule a briefing on what current AI systems can and cannot do for your organization.
Enjoyed this article? Share it with a colleague who needs to see it. Stay informed by subscribing to our email list and following us on Google News, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more exclusive cybersecurity insights and expert analyses.
Intelligence. Protection. Strategy. www.ogunsecurity.com
About the Author
Dr. Sunday Oludare Ogunlana is the Founder and CEO of OGUN Security Research and Strategic Consulting LLC, a Professor of Cybersecurity, a national security scholar, and a television commentator.
Comments