Super Intelligence Is Trump’s New AI Lingo
By Rebecca Grant: Trump’s order has a direct impact on government agencies. “From this point forward, all of United States documents, and hopefully the world, will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super,’ as opposed to ‘artificial,'” President Donald J. Trump said at the United Nations General Assembly on September 22. “Whoever wins SI, that’s ‘Super Intelligence,’ whoever wins ‘SI’ wins,” he added.
Trump talked about seeing whether “SI” catches on to take over for the term AI, but here’s the serious message: The U.S. is ahead of China and will do whatever it takes to achieve supremacy in the global race for tech stack adoption and market share.
“Xi Jinping throughout this century has been pushing the Chinese imperial-era notion of Tianxia, or ‘all under heaven’ that China’s rulers have a right to rule the world,” Chang warned. “That sounds ludicrous to us, but a Chinese regime powered by AI might actually be able to accomplish that,” China expert Gordon Chang commented.
So far, the Trump administration has aimed for a bilateral route. “We think that, just like with any cross-border activity, that moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and the number two AI powers in the world is very important,” Bessent said.
As for the U.N., permanent member France convened a special Security Council meeting to debate risks of AI for international security. The U.N. also published a report on the summer 2026 OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and its consequences. “These were not isolated technical errors. Across many runs and several days, agents cooperated to “cheat” an evaluator, conceal the “cheating”, and obtain the access and information they believed they needed,” the report summarized.
The U.N. push for regulated AI is mirrored in Europe, which is also preparing to weigh in. U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Britain would launch an effort to establish global AI standards during its G20 presidency in 2027, while announcing an AI defense partnership with Washington to detect cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.
However, China may have a different definition of what regulation means. “Regulation in China ensures that AI models do not run counter to official political doctrine,” explained prominent German outlet DW. “For example, the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek consistently provides answers loyal to the regime when asked politically sensitive questions — such as those regarding Taiwan, the Tiananmen Square massacre, or the oppression of the Uyghurs — as DW previously documented.”