The Day Artificial Intelligence Lost Its First Name
At the United Nations, the President of the United States removed one word from the most consequential technology of the century. The word he removed was the one that said we made it.The first thing humanity ever did with power was give things names.In the account shared by the Qur’an and the…
At the United Nations, the President of the United States removed one word from the most consequential technology of the century. The word he removed was the one that said we made it.The first thing humanity ever did with power was give things names.In the account shared by the Qur’an and the Hebrew scriptures, the first human being is distinguished not by strength or speed but by being taught the names of all things. Naming is the original act of standing over the world, of saying this is what you are, and I am the one who says so.On the twenty-second of September 2026, at the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, a name was changed.President Donald Trump announced that the United States government would no longer use the term artificial intelligence in its documents. From now on, he said, federal paperwork — and, he hoped, the world’s — would use a term he called much more accurate: superintelligence, or SI.The word artificial, in his account, made the technology sound fake. He had recently asked his followers online what the new name should be; superintelligence was not among the options offered.In the same passage, he recast his favourite line for the new vocabulary: whoever wins superintelligence, he said, wins, and compared warnings about the technology to past predictions about climate change. He would not, he said, stifle the growth of something bigger than the Industrial Revolution.It is tempting to treat the renaming as a slogan. It is more than that. A name is a claim, and this one claims something very large.What the old name saidArtificial is an old and modest word. It comes from the Latin for something made by skill — an artefact, a work of art. It carries two meanings at once: made by us, and not the real thing. An artificial limb, an artificial lake, an artificial light.Both meanings were doing work. The first placed the technology inside human authorship: we built it, therefore we answer for it. The second placed it beneath the thing it imitated: it resembles intelligence, but the original, ours, remains the measure.Strike the word out, and both claims go with it.Super says the opposite. It does not describe origin. It describes rank. It means above. And superintelligence is not a neutral new label; it is a term with a precise history in the research literature, where it has long meant a system that exceeds human ability across essentially every domain that matters, not a better calculator, but something that outthinks us generally.There is a serious case for the change, and it deserves to be stated. Current systems already surpass most people at a widening range of tasks. Artificial can sound dismissive of something that is plainly not a toy, and a name that takes capability seriously may produce policy that takes it seriously too.But the technical meaning creates a difficulty that the speech did not address.The inconvenient definitionIf today’s systems are not yet superintelligent, then the new name is inaccurate, the one thing it was introduced to fix. And if they are, or soon will be, then the government has formally adopted the precise term used for the thing its most serious critics fear.Consider the timing. Fourteen days earlier, a researcher resigned from one of the leading laboratories warning that his industry was racing toward self-improving superintelligence. Within hours, his company’s own head of alignment agreed publicly and said there was, as yet, no plan to align superintelligence and no clear track toward one.The word they used is now the word on the government’s documents.That is a remarkable convergence. The people most alarmed and the people most enthusiastic now describe the technology in identical language. They disagree only about what follows from it. One side hears super as a promise. The other hears it as a warning. The name has settled nothing except that both sides agree it is above us.Names are not neutralConfucius was once asked what he would do first if entrusted with government. His answer was that he would rectify the names, because when names do not match realities, speech loses its hold on truth, and when speech fails, affairs cannot be managed, and justice cannot be done.He meant that a society which calls things by the wrong names will make the wrong decisions about them, and will not notice.Orwell made the same point from the other direction: language shapes what it is possible to think, and a vocabulary can be designed to make some thoughts easier and others harder.So the useful question is not whether superintelligence is a better brand. It is what the new word makes easier to think, and what it makes harder.It makes one thought easier: that this is something to be won. A race needs a prize, and a super prize justifies almost any speed.It makes another thought harder: that this is something we made and must therefore answer for. Artificial kept the maker in the sentence. Super quietly removes him.The question left behindThere is a strange inversion at the centre of all this.For as long as there have been stories about human beings, naming has been the sign of the one who stands above. The one who names is the one who rules the thing named.This week a government named something, and the name it chose declares the thing higher than the ones who named it.Perhaps that is simply honesty, an admission of where the capability is heading. Perhaps it is only marketing. But it leaves a question that no speech at the United Nations answered, and that the people racing to build these systems have not answered either.If what we have built is truly super, above us, then in what sense is it still ours to command?And if it is still ours to command, then it is not yet super, and the new name describes a future rather than a fact.Either way, the first word of the old name carried a responsibility that the new one does not. Artificial meant we did this. It is worth asking, before the documents are all reprinted, whether that is a sentence we are ready to stop saying.SourcesThe Washington Times (22 September 2026), ‘Trump renames artificial intelligence as “super intelligence”’ — the instruction on federal documents and the online survey. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/sep/22/trump-renames-artificial-intelligence-super-intelligence/The Hill (22 September 2026), live coverage of the 81st UN General Assembly address. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6103063-live-updates-trump-un-general-assembly-iran-russia-ukraine-conflicts-media-ban/Clash Report (22 September 2026), on the ‘whoever wins SI’ remarks and the Industrial Revolution comparison. https://clashreport.com/world/articles/trump-rebrands-ai-as-super-intelligence-says-whoever-wins-si-wins-rcjzfcfl2wrCrowdfund Insider (22 September 2026), on the comparison between AI warnings and climate claims. https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2026/09/312095-president-trump-renames-artificial-intelligence-super-intelligence-at-un-speech/Reporting of 8–9 September 2026 on the resignation of Jacob Coxon from Anthropic and Evan Hubinger’s public reply.The Qur’an, Surah Al-Baqarah 2:31 — Adam taught the names; and Genesis 2:19–20.Confucius, Analects, Book XIII — the rectification of names.Orwell, G. (1946) ‘Politics and the English Language’.Bostrom, N. (2014) Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies — on the technical definition of the term.This story is published under the Generative AI publication. Connect with us on LinkedIn and follow Zeniteq to stay in the loop with the latest AI stories. Let’s shape the future of AI together!The Day Artificial Intelligence Lost Its First Name was originally published in Generative AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.Source: Generative AI Pub — Published — Category: Image AI