Trump renames AI "Super Intelligence" at the UN, a name that wasn't on his first ballot
His Truth Social poll opened with three names, and the one he announced at the UN wasn't among them.
On September 22, 2026, President Trump stood at the United Nations General Assembly and rejected any global control of AI. In the same sentence he renamed it. AI is "hereinafter officially called" Super Intelligence, going by the White House's own summary of the speech.
He got the name from a poll he'd been running on Truth Social since September 19, and I was surprised to find Super Intelligence wasn't on the ballot when that poll opened.
The United States totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme of control for the Artificial Intelligence being spoken of so much now
What Trump said at the UN
It was a small part of a long speech. The White House summary quotes him eleven times and only once on AI.
Trump was already using the initials two days later. Before Xi Jinping's White House visit on September 24 he posted that "Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion", and that he wanted to "leave it exactly where it is". China, he wrote, feels the same way. (Xi's own remarks that day are in our earlier story.)
How the poll went
His first post called the words Artificial Intelligence "inaccurate, and very ineloquent" and offered Superior, Extreme or Supreme Intelligence instead. Supreme went the next morning, "losing badly to both" of the others. Then on September 21 he asked again. Extreme had vanished by then. Super had taken its place.
- Poll opens with three names
- Supreme Intelligence is dropped
- Super vs. Superior Intelligence
- UN speech makes it official
- Super Intelligence on the agenda with Xi
I don't know why Super replaced Extreme, and none of his posts says. (Our story on the AI Force post and the first days of the vote went up on September 20, before the swap.)
The word already had a meaning
In AI policy, superintelligence has meant something far beyond today's chatbots. Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar introduced a bill on September 23, a day after the speech, that would ban artificial superintelligence (we covered it that day). Their definition is AI that "exceeds human cognitive performance and capabilities across most domains".
Trump's version covers every chatbot you can use today.
More on AI policy
- Xi used his White House welcome to call for keeping AI always under human controlSeptember 24, 2026
- UK regulator proposes AI assistants like ChatGPT on Google's choice screens, with a prompt every yearSeptember 23, 2026
- The UN's AI panel spent its first thematic brief on 1,200 agents inside OpenAI's own testsSeptember 21, 2026
- Trump is forming an AI Force, but he calls the push to slow AI a hoaxSeptember 20, 2026