Trump backs “super intelligence” label as governments debate AI safeguards

President Donald Trump has said the US government will refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” in official communications, arguing that the new description is more accurate. He made the announcement during the UN General Assembly, where leaders debated how to respond to the technology’s risks. Trump reaffirmed his opposition to regulating AI through what he described as a global scheme.

He said new technologies brought challenges but compared warnings about AI to past warnings over climate change, which he characterised as overstated. He also said the word “artificial” undersold the technology and expressed hope that other countries would adopt the proposed term. More than 20 mainly European countries had called ahead of the assembly for binding safety measures for advanced AI.

The United States and China, described in the source material as the leading AI powers, did not endorse the proposal. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said he intended to use Britain’s hosting of next year’s Group of 20 to pursue a common set of international principles and standards. French President Emmanuel Macron separately urged countries to combine their investment capacity to develop an open-source AI model that was not dependent on either major power.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on the US and China to establish a dialogue on AI’s future, comparing the proposed communication to contacts between Washington and Moscow during the Cold War. He said governments with the greatest AI capabilities carried the greatest responsibility for managing shared risks. France, which holds the UN Security Council presidency this month, has convened a meeting on AI and international peace and security.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman is scheduled to address it, while Anthropic chief Dario Amodei and Hugging Face co-founder Clement Delangue are due to participate remotely, according to a French official.