Trump’s AI rebrand may stop at the White House - POLITICO
Short summary
Trump signed an executive order telling federal agencies to call AI "superintelligence" instead, but tech industry insiders and lobbyists aren't buying the rebrand and expect it to remain a White House-only quirk.
- Trump pushed the "superintelligence" terminology through weeks of Truth Social posts before formalizing it via executive order on Tuesday
- Tech industry observers and lobbyists dismissed the rebrand as unlikely to gain traction outside government
Full summary
Trump signed an executive order late Tuesday forcing federal agencies to stop using "artificial intelligence" and start calling it "superintelligence" instead. This caps off weeks of the president pushing the rebranding on Truth Social, his preferred platform for announcements. The move reflects Trump's pattern of trying to reshape language around technology to suit his messaging.
Tech industry lobbyists and people who actually follow this stuff closely aren't buying it. Kovacevich and other observers view the rebrand as performative—something Trump can claim credit for within his administration but that won't stick anywhere else. The order only affects how federal agencies talk about the technology internally and in official communications.
The real gap here is between what Trump can mandate inside government and what the private sector, academia, and the broader tech world will actually do. Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta aren't going to overhaul their product names and documentation because of a federal order. The term "artificial intelligence" has decades of entrenchment behind it. So while Trump gets his executive action and the headline, the rebrand stops at the White House gates.