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Trump's Super Intelligence order leaves its substance to a definition the science adviser must write
President Trump ordered agencies to swap 'AI' for 'Super Intelligence' in non-statutory documents and told his science adviser to write a federal definition. How broadly it is drawn decides whether the order changes more than agency vocabulary.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- The White House said the order also tells agencies to "no longer acknowledge" the terms "artificial intelligence" and "AI".
- The same adviser is to recommend any further executive actions needed to put the new terminology into effect.
- Tech executives at a White House summit the same day signed an accord on Super Intelligence that Trump said is "morally binding" on them.
- A Quinnipiac poll released that afternoon found 25% of respondents approve of Trump's handling of AI and 58% disapprove.
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Why it matters
- constraint Agencies still have to administer statutes written around "artificial intelligence" while told to stop acknowledging the term, because the order reaches only non-statutory materials.
- exposure Companies selling software to agencies cannot tell whether federal documents will call their products SI until the adviser's definition is published.
- decision The adviser's choice between a definition as broad as AI and a capability threshold decides whether any recommended executive actions have a narrow class of systems to act on.
The definition has to settle a question the order leaves open. Does SI cover the same systems the old term did, or only some of them [4]? Trump's own justification in the order leans toward the same systems. "The term 'Super Intelligence' more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies," Trump wrote [6]. Those are the technologies the executive branch has been calling artificial intelligence [1]. At last week's United Nations General Assembly, Trump said, "Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this, and now I say whoever wins SI, whoever wins superintelligence, wins. That's the group that wins." [7]
The accord the executives signed points the same way. Johnson gave its title as "The White House Accord on Superintelligence: A Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities" [8]. The document needs the word "Frontier" to pick out the labs signing it. That treats SI, without the qualifier, as the larger category [8].
I expect the adviser to write a definition about as wide as AI. That would leave the order a relabel, like the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario orders before it [17]. The text also supports the opposite case. A capability threshold would give the administration a narrow class of systems on which to hang later executive actions, and the adviser's instruction to recommend further steps allows that [5]. It would also leave agencies with no official name for ordinary machine-learning tools, since they are told to stop acknowledging the old one [3]. A definition with a capability or compute cut-off, or recommended actions that attach purchasing or reporting terms to SI, would prove this view wrong. Neither published account of the order mentions funding or procurement [2].
The administration is also declining to write binding rules. Trump has opposed formal guardrails [11]. Asked why there should not be government-mandated safety guardrails, he said, "Because we have people that love our country and love the world a lot." [12] Johnson said of the accord, "This is a statement of principles that you'll see, a statement of standards, commitments that are voluntary on behalf of the industry. It sets forth expectations." [10]
Trump's net approval on AI in the Quinnipiac survey is minus 33 points [1]. The poll put it below his ratings on the Iran war at 28%, the economy at 31% and U.S.-China policy at 34% [14]. The gap to the Iran war figure is 3 points, smaller than the survey's 3.8-point margin of error [2][15]. Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement, "But changing what we call artificial intelligence does nothing to address the very real risks that come with increasingly powerful AI systems." [16]
What to watch
- The adviser's federal definition of SI, and whether it sets a capability or compute threshold or simply maps onto what agencies called AI.
- The additional executive actions the adviser recommends, and whether any attach procurement or reporting terms to systems defined as SI.
- Release of the accord's full text, whose specifics were unclear when CNBC asked the White House for details.