Trump brands users of the term ‘artificial intelligence’ enemies of the White House

President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday: “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”³. The statement is the president’s own and carries no legal effect^2,3.

Politico reported that the threat came a week after Trump signed an executive order renaming AI to “super intelligence”². Axios noted that the White House itself continues to use the term AI, and that the branding blurs the distinction between AI and super intelligence, a hypothetical version of AI more advanced than human intelligence³. Anadolu also carried the remarks⁷.

The language sat alongside a set of announcements. At the Science: A New Golden Age Summit the administration said it was launching the most ambitious set of science initiatives in decades, which by its own account represents over 6 billion dollars in investments across the federal government, industry, academia and philanthropy¹. That figure is the White House’s claim rather than an independently verified total¹.

Why it matters to investors

The same week brought honours for the firms the administration also regulates. Trump awarded the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, with recipients including Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, Google co-founder and former Alphabet president Sergey Brin and Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella⁵. A separate account listed Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Huang of Nvidia, Lisa Su of AMD and Michael Dell of Dell Technologies among those receiving White House national medals⁴.

For investors the signal is not the vocabulary but the proximity. The Washington Post reported on the administration’s “Super Intelligence Force” wanting safety without slowing innovation, and on a White House hope of reducing public fears, in an account that named Huang, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Musk⁶. Policy on this industry is being set in a room containing the industry’s largest listed beneficiaries.

What to watch

Watch whether the renaming executive order carries into regulation and procurement language, or stays rhetorical². Watch how much of the 6 billion dollars the White House describes is new federal money as against industry, academic and philanthropic commitments counted alongside it¹. And watch whether the safety-without-slowdown posture the Washington Post describes survives contact with the first serious incident⁶. The gap Axios identified, between the term the president demands and the term his own White House uses, is the simplest measure of whether any of this binds³.