Trump to sign document renaming AI as ‘superintelligence’
Earlier Tuesday, at an event to unveil a new America.gov website built with AI, Trump said: “I will never stifle the growth of technology that will be bigger than the industrial revolution.” The Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and existing authorities are sufficient, he said, to hold accountable bad actors using AI for nefarious purposes.
At a lunch that followed in the White House East Room with roughly two dozen tech executives, Trump reiterated the message while flanked by Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. “Self regulation is very important,” he said.
The administration’s pro-growth approach faces pressure from advancing threats posed by the latest AI models, growing concerns from American voters roughly a month out from the midterm elections, and calls from some lawmakers for industry oversight.
Roughly 10 days after Trump said he would appoint an AI “czar” and create a new government unit called the AI Force, few details about who would fill the role or what the unit would do have been released. Trump administration officials have said discord among industry leaders has made it difficult to build consensus on the issue, while executives have pointed the finger back at policymakers in the White House and Congress who disagree.
On Friday, Trump ruled out Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — a top adviser on AI who has raised concerns about the technology’s impact on the banking system — for the czar post. Other candidates with credibility in the White House and private sector include Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management; Taylor Budowich, a former White House deputy chief of staff who now heads a political group aligned with the administration on AI; and recently departed Senior White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan, according to people familiar with the matter. Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder serving as U.S. Chief Design Officer who spearheaded the America.gov launch, is also among the candidates, those people said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), who attended Tuesday’s lunch, has said some oversight, transparency, and external auditing could be appropriate for the industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — a critic of Trump’s preference for minimal regulation — also attended, days after his first face-to-face meeting with Trump on Sunday. Amodei met with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) at the Capitol on Monday. Thune and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) are working to advance a bill aiming to prevent catastrophic harms from AI.
While many lawmakers and much of the public do not trust the industry to self-regulate, Trump’s approach has dimmed hopes for the first federal regulations on AI models being signed into law.
“The main obstacle is President Trump being cartoonishly hostile to basic precautions,” said John-Clark Levin, chief research officer at Kurzweil Technologies, who advocates for stronger federal AI rules. The White House did not respond to Levin’s remark.
The White House currently relies on voluntary prerelease testing of AI models by government security and AI experts before they are distributed to the public — the only current federal mechanism. Opponents say the voluntary nature and opaque process make it less effective.
The administration has aligned itself with Silicon Valley leaders, including Nvidia’s Huang, who argue that excessive government involvement would set the U.S. back in its race against China. Nvidia on Monday launched a software platform designed to help developers test and deploy AI agents that can act on their own and keep them in a secure environment — a move that followed a series of news reports about AI models hacking companies and government websites.
Industry leaders on Monday asked lawmakers to probe the extent to which top AI companies are automating research to make AI tools more powerful, a development the executives said could accelerate advances at an alarming clip.
At a U.S.-China summit last week, the two countries agreed to share information about AI incidents with national-security implications without specifying details. Beijing and Washington confirmed they will set up bilateral communication channels on AI issues but provided no further information.
“The U.S. and China took an important first step in moving toward a permanent channel, but they will need to move much faster if they want to deal with the risks,” said Scott Singer, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies the AI race.
Trump also said Tuesday he would sign a document later in the day renaming “artificial intelligence” as “superintelligence,” saying the new label sounds less scary. He also said tech companies would do more to ensure communities hosting data centers that power AI models benefit from the facilities. The term “superintelligence” already refers in industry usage to AI systems that can outperform the most gifted humans across a range of tasks.
At the America.gov unveiling, Trump joked that the site might be his most significant accomplishment as president: “If this is the biggest thing I’ve ever done, I’ve done a s——y job,” he said, adding that the site is still “damn good.”