U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed replacing the term "artificial intelligence," arguing that the name leaves people with the impression that machines will replace humans and fuels negative perceptions of the technology.
Trump posted three candidate names on his social media platform Truth Social — "superior intelligence," "extreme intelligence" and "supreme intelligence" — and asked supporters to vote, Forbes reported on the 19th. He called AI an "inaccurate and very clumsy" name.
In the post, Trump said "many people" consider artificial intelligence an "inaccurate and very clumsy" name. He offered the three alternatives as "far more elegant and accurate" options. The poll drew close to 30,000 participants within an hour of posting, and "superior intelligence" was leading with 42% as of that day.
A Pew Research Center survey of 36 countries released on the 17th found that the share of Americans aged 18 to 34 who said they were more concerned than excited about AI jumped to 55% from 40% in 2024. In Australia, the United States, Brazil and Canada, more than 50% of respondents said they were more concerned than excited.
This is not the first time Trump has tried to shift public perception by renaming things. He labeled mainstream media coverage "fake news" and popularized the term "deep state" to describe government officials. He also referred to COVID-19 as the "China virus" and "kung flu."
The proposal comes as the debate over AI regulation intensifies. Opinion split sharply after Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei recently called for deliberately slowing the development of frontier AI models until Congress is better able to regulate the industry. Trump, along with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), has firmly rejected calls to slow development. Their argument is that forcing U.S. labs to halt or slow work would be self-inflicted harm and would hand AI dominance to Chinese companies.
Trump dismissed warnings that AI could bring catastrophe to humanity or that robots will take over the world as "a lie and a disgusting conspiracy." He also maintains that formal safeguards or mandated slowdowns are unnecessary. Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk, by contrast, have said AI models are advancing faster than humans can align, test and safely control them.
Trump wrote on Truth Social that the United States already holds "massive criminal and regulatory power" over these companies. He said a "disgusting conspiracy" targeting AI and data centers is under way and that only China welcomes it, adding that whoever wins in AI wins, and that the United States is ahead of China and every other country and will remain so. He also warned conspiracy theorists, traitors, betrayers and leakers to watch out.
