AI, Politics
Trump's 'Super Intelligence' Rebrand Exposed AI Executives' Lack of Backbone
When the president ordered tech leaders to abandon seven decades of terminology, none pushed back—revealing how easily power bends billionaires to loyalty tests.
WIRED — AI
President Trump has ordered the abandonment of "artificial intelligence" as the preferred term for the field, declaring instead that the government will use "Super Intelligence." At a recent White House lunch, top executives from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, OpenAI, and other firms reportedly accepted this decree without objection—a striking capitulation that says far more about their willingness to appease power than about the technology itself.
A 70-Year-Old Term Goes Down Without a Fight#
John McCarthy coined the phrase "artificial intelligence" in 1956 when scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to explore an audacious premise: machines might someday achieve human-like reasoning. The term became foundational to an entire discipline and to the identity of every major tech company now racing to dominate the field. A search of Google Scholar yields nearly 7.5 million results for "artificial intelligence"—the phrase is so embedded in our vocabulary that even critics of AI know exactly what we mean by it.
Yet in a September speech at the UN, Trump signaled displeasure with the terminology. This week, he made it official: an executive order rebranding the entire field. According to observers, not a single executive in the room—not Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, or Elon Musk—offered any resistance.
The Ultimate Loyalty Test#
Author Jacob Weisberg, who wrote a recent study on collaboration under Trump, interprets the episode as a textbook loyalty examination: a demand designed to see whether otherwise powerful figures will humiliate themselves to win favor and avoid the president's displeasure. "The only way to resist this kind of thing is by acting collectively," Weisberg noted. If these leaders had united to reject the name change, he reasoned, "what would he have done?"
Instead, the silence allowed Trump to claim vindication. In a post-lunch press exchange, when a reporter mentioned AI agents, he corrected her: "The name has been changed by the biggest, the smartest, the greatest people anywhere in the world." Yet no evidence supports that these executives had previously advocated for such a change. Satya Nadella once mused about preferring "different intelligence," but that hasn't stopped Microsoft from using "AI" everywhere—even as the company champions the rebrand. Mark Zuckerberg named his research initiative a "Superintelligence Lab" while Meta continues selling "Meta AI" products.
