Trump's 'Super Intelligence' AI rebrand is running ahead of the technology

(Image credit: Shutterstock) The U.S. government has a new task force devoted to AI — and it's decided that it would now prefer that everyone stops calling it artificial intelligence.President Donald Trump has announced the creation of the “Super Intelligence Force,” a White House-led group that will spend the next 120 days examining the risks, opportunities, and appropriate federal response to rapidly advancing AI systems. The task force responds to mounting pressure from lawmakers and even AI company executives for stronger safeguards around increasingly capable models.The group has a formidable remit. Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will lead what is supposed to include work on cybersecurity, biosecurity, and more standards, along with reviewing how AI companies report breaches and hacks.There is substance buried underneath the comic branding. OpenAI and Anthropic have both been dealing with increasingly uncomfortable demonstrations of what powerful models can do with cyber tools. The new task force is at least an acknowledgment that voluntary promises from AI companies cannot be the entire federal strategy.A super rebrand (Image credit: Getty Images)Elon Musk then entered the naming discussion, responding “Yes, we will make that change,” when asked on X whether SpaceX's AI operation would change its name from SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.This would be the third rebrand for the AI branch of the company and, like those other new names, doesn't actually change the technology or the business.The SI terminology comes directly from Trump. An executive order signed in late September directs executive departments and agencies to use “Super Intelligence” and “SI” instead of “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official communications and other non-statutory documents.Sign up for breaking news, reviews, opinion, top tech deals, and more.The order argues that today's frontier systems have moved beyond merely imitating or automating human intelligence and that the new terminology better reflects their “promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities.”For now, the executive order defines “Super Intelligence” as the same technologies already covered by the federal statutory definition of artificial intelligence. It asks officials to develop a possible new federal definition within 60 days, but the immediate transformation from AI to SI is linguistic rather than architectural. And even then, seems unlikely to spread very far. SpaceXAI becoming SpaceXSI is much more about politics and branding than a technological milestone.Notably, “superintelligence” is already used in AI discussions. It's how researchers refer to a hypothetical artificial intelligence that significantly exceeds human capabilities in many ways.But language does shape how technology is sold and regulated, and “artificial intelligence” has accumulated plenty of baggage after several years of hallucinations, deepfakes, job anxiety, copyright fights and increasingly unsettling demonstrations of autonomous behavior.Trump explicitly calls renaming it super intelligence a way to spin the technology more positively as something to “empower Americans, strengthen our economy, and improve the lives of the American people.”Watchdog with a countdown (Image credit: RozenskiP / Shutterstock)The Super Intelligence Force arrives after a White House meeting with AI leaders who signed voluntary commitments covering internal model evaluations, independent external audits, and board-level oversight. But corporate promises alone won't settle any argument about technological abilities or regulation. Its charter gives it 120 days to develop recommendations, with the possibility that its work could be extended or transferred elsewhere. There is already disagreement about how far oversight should go.“Greater international oversight is absolutely necessary, but concentrating responsibility in one single, global body isn’t the answer,” Nik Kairinos, CEO and co-founder of RAIDS AI said in a statement. “AI is developing far too quickly and across too many jurisdictions for one organization to effectively police it. A stronger and more realistic model would be decentralized oversight, with a broad and diverse ecosystem of AI companies monitoring and scrutinizing one another.”The difficulty is making decentralized oversight genuinely independent when many of the organizations scrutinizing one another also share an enormous financial interest in keeping development moving quickly.The Trump administration appears determined to avoid moving too aggressively. But AI policy has the problem of trying to govern technology that can change substantially between the drafting of a rule and its implementation. A 120-day task force is therefore potentially more useful than another years-long commission producing a report about models that nobody uses anymore.But trying to rename AI to “SI” does not make today's models superintelligent any more than changing SpaceXAI's name makes the employees more intelligent. The Super Intelligence Force might have some value, but it won't be because of any branding exercise.“Oversight itself needs to be continuous, distributed and capable of evolving at the same speed as the technology,” Kairinos said. “Rules and standards set by governments are then an important supporting layer. The safest AI ecosystem will be one where responsibility for keeping systems in check is shared, rather than concentrated in the hands of a single watchdog.” Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.