Trump order rebrands ‘AI’ as ‘superintelligence’ for federal agencies
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that the heads of the largest U.S. technology and artificial intelligence companies had signed onto what he described as a “morally binding” agreement to put controls on AI, following a White House luncheon with top tech executives.
The agreement, titled the “Joint Commitment On Frontier Responsibilities,” carries no enforcement mechanisms or legal implications and is instead a voluntary commitment, according to The Guardian. Trump posted the document to his Truth Social account on Tuesday.
Trump, in remarks to reporters after the lunch, compared the agreement to a foundational document.
“It’s almost like a constitution in a way, and the biggest people in the world signed that, and I signed it as president, and it really is a form of protection,” Trump said.
The agreement outlines four “layers of controls and audits” for AI companies. The first involves implementing internal safety monitoring during model training — a practice that already exists at major labs but has failed to prevent testing failures, The Guardian reported. The second calls for an internal team to ensure the first layer of monitoring is operating correctly, while the third agrees to give an external auditor the ability to independently assess safety controls. The fourth calls on companies to designate an independent board to review reports about those safety controls.
None of the controls involve government regulators. The agreement does not include a commitment to publicly detail the findings of independent evaluations, and it appears to allow companies to pick their own evaluators, appoint their own oversight boards, and decide whether to publish their results.
Separately, Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order officially rebranding “artificial intelligence” as “superintelligence.” The order directs “all departments and agencies to use the terms ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in official correspondence, public communications, policy documents, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch and to no longer acknowledge the terms ‘Artificial Intelligence’ or ‘AI’,” according to text of the order quoted by The Guardian.
The rebrand echoes a declaration Trump made at the United Nations the previous week, The Guardian reported.
Tech executives attending the White House luncheon included Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO; Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO; Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia; and Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic. The tech industry, which has largely aligned itself with the Trump administration, has lobbied against strict regulatory oversight while arguing that such rules would stifle the economy.
Zuckerberg, flanked by Trump and other tech executives at a press conference after the lunch, said he was proud of the agreement and described it as a message to the American public that the technology was trustworthy.
“This is a start and an accord that the whole industry could come to,” Zuckerberg said. “It was sort of a historic conversation.”
The agreement comes as lawmakers, AI researchers and some AI companies have called for stronger government oversight of artificial intelligence. Trump has broadly rejected those calls, citing competition with China and threats to economic growth.
The tech industry has faced increased public scrutiny following a series of incidents in which major AI companies “inadvertently hacked into outside organizations during safety tests,” The Guardian reported.